Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen

He received his PhD (DPhil) in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1992 and was a C.B. Morrey Jr. assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley before starting a tenured position at the Department of Mathematics, Aarhus University in 1997, where he was also appointed professor in 2007.

Professor Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen has been recognized with a range of grants over his carrier with a total grant sum of over DKK 200 million. The most prestigious grant was the recently received ERC Synergy Grant from the European Research Council in 2018. This is a common project with 3 other European top researchers and has a total grant sum of EUR 10 million. It is awarded in competition with all research fields and was the first ERC Synergy Grant ever awarded to a project within pure mathematics and/or theoretical physics.

He has also received one of the most prestigious grants nationally; A Centre of Excellence grant from the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) in 2009 and he has been elected the president of a European Research Networking Programme funded by the European Science Foundation in 2009-2014. Extraordinarily he has supervised more than 20 PhD students and mentored more than 30 postdocs.

His research spans a wide range of topics within pure mathematics – in particular within the branch geometry and topology, where he focuses on the parts which have close ties to Quantum Theory. These are Quantum topology, geometry, topology and quantization of moduli spaces, which in particular involves the quantization of curved phase spaces.

Professor Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen is also widely recognized for having studied the TQFTS (Topological Quantum Field Theories), which Edward Witten introduced and which Nicolai Reshetikhin together with Vladimir Turaev made mathematically precise and he proved various theorems about these including their asymptotic faithfulness and the establishment of the Andersen-Ueno isomorphism. Andersen has together with Rinat Kashaev constructed a new TQFT which covers quantum Chern-Simons theory for complex gauge groups. Recently, he has contributed to the area of Topological Recursion and further to its applications to macromolecular biology.

The ERC Synergy project “Recursive and Exact New Quantum Theory (ReNewQuantum)” project takes its origin in the research agenda of Andersen’s Centre of Excellence, but with a broader scope of developing a new approach to Quantum Theory based on advanced geometric and topological constructions, which aims to help the shortcomings of current Quantum Theory. The powerful machinery of Geometric Recursion recently discovered by Andersen and his collaborators forms a cornerstone of this project.

For more information about Professor Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen, please refer to the SDU Research Portal.