Mathematician Nihat Ay will join SFI’s resident faculty beginning next summer, SFI Chair of Faculty and VP for Science Jennifer Dunne announced today.
“We are excited to bring Nihat to SFI as a part-time professor, as he brings training in mathematics as well as deep expertise and wide-ranging curiosity on topics at the intersection of information theory, embodied cognition, robustness, and quantitative theory of causality," she says. "His ability to formalize fundamental aspects of empirical science is outstanding, and he is deeply committed to complex systems research. As a former SFI postdoc and external faculty member, he has already collaborated with a diverse set of SFI scientists."
Ay will spend three months of the year at SFI and nine months in his current position as leader of the Information Theory of Cognitive Systems group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.
“SFI is known as the institute for complexity science," Ay says. "I am confident that, based on 30 years of excellent research, SFI will play a leading role in integrating existing approaches and studies to one unified theory of complexity. Such a theory will require advanced analytical tools and, in particular, mathematics. Therefore, I see my research on complexity more than ever well placed at SFI."
Ay has a long history studying topics close to SFI’s interests. As an undergraduate, he wrote a thesis on the geometry of the Amari-Hopfield model, an early neural network model of memory. He continued studying neural networks at Max Planck and earned a mathematics PhD at the University of Leipzig in 2001 with a thesis on information geometry with applications to complexity theory. He came to SFI as a postdoctoral fellow in 2003 and has been in his current position at Max Planck since 2005.