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SCNAT honours the four best dissertations in sciences
The storage of radioactive waste, the pollination of plants, the use of solar energy, and the mathematical parsing of knots and surfaces – the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT) will honour the four most important discoveries and solutions by young researchers at Swiss universities with the Prix Schläfli 2018 in Bern on 25 May. Alexandre Bagnoud (Geosciences), Livio Liechti (Mathematics), Hester Sheehan (Biology) and Xiaojiang Xie (Chemistry) win the prize for discoveries made while working on their dissertations. The Prix Schläfli has been awarded since 1866.
Image: Manu FriederichPrix Schläfli 2018 in Chemistry: Xiaojiang Xie
He is described as a "volcano of scientific ideas" by Eric Bakker, his PhD supervisor at the University of Geneva. Xiaojiang Xie laughs a little when he hears this on the phone in his hometown of Shenzen, to which he returned two years ago. Prior to that, he had been a researcher for five years in Geneva and Paris, where he launched a career that would make the world sit up and take notice.
Image: Xiaojiang XiePrix Schläfli 2018 in Geosciences: Alexandre Bagnoud
Not far from St. Ursanne, the idyllic medieval village on the Doubs, there is another, quite different visitor attraction: swisstopo's Mont Terri rock laboratory. The microbiologist Alexandre Bagnoud often visited this laboratory between 2012 and 2016, not as a layman curious about optimum conditions for storing radioactive waste, but as an active researcher.
Image: Alexandre BagnoudPrix Schläfli 2018 in Mathematics: Livio Liechti
We could start with flamenco. Or with doughnuts. But neither of these would really help us to understand Livio Liechti's research. "On the spectra of mapping classes and the 4-genera of positive knots" is the title of the thesis which he submitted a year ago – and anybody who can visualise this has to be a member of a select circle of specialists. Whereby "visualise" is a fairly apt term. "I like the fact that the objects of my field of research are quite visual," says Liechti. He thinks of them three-dimensionally – and his mathematical thought processes also often work on this visual level, and not only in formulas, figures and logical sentences.
Image: Livio Liechti