The 2026 Weierstrass Lecture will take place on June 12, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. in Lecture Hall O1. We are delighted to welcome Prof. Peter Sarnak to Paderborn for the Weierstrass Lecture. Prof. Sarnak is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Among other things, Peter Sarnak pioneered the analysis of connections between questions in theoretical physics and analytic number theory. In 1998, Sarnak was honored with the George Pólya Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM); in 2001, he received the Ostrowski Prize; and in 2003, the Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society. For his work in number theory, he was awarded the prestigious Frank Nelson Cole Prize by the American Mathematical Society in 2005. This was followed by the Lester R. Ford Award in 2012, the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2014, the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society in 2019, and the Shaw Prize in 2024.

The historical lecture will be given by Prof. Thomas Sonar. Prof. Sonar is a professor of technical mathematics and head of the Partial Differential Equations Department at the Technical University of Braunschweig. In 2004, he founded the Mathe-Lok teacher training center at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has also published extensively on the history of mathematics, particularly on Dedekind, Gauss, Newton, and Leibniz, and is the author of the book *3000 Years of Analysis*. In 2003, he delivered the Gauss Lecture in Göttingen on the topic of entropy and dissipation—discrete models of nonlinear transport processes.