Dear Menny, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Menny Akka's introductory lecture and to introduce him to you.
Menny grew up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Tel Aviv, where he also attended high school and where his great passion for physics and mathematics did not remain unnoticed. He started his university studies in Israel, but went international for his master thesis and joined the ALGANT (centered around his ongoing mathematical love affairs ALgebra, Geometry and Number Theory) programme in Bordeaux and Leiden. Back in Israel, Menny did his Ph.D. thesis at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at Hebrew University, under the supervision of Alex Lubotzky with a topic on arithmetic groups and profinite completion. After his post doc years at EPFL and ETH Zurich, Menny joined the D-MATH as a senior scientist. In 2023 he finally did his habilitation in Mathematics.
Menny loves music, enjoys playing it and is happily getting acquainted with new instruments: currently it is a famously easy one, namely the violin. This is also allegoric for his approach to mathematics: he told me how much he has always enjoyed to learn new mathematical 'instruments' when meditating about his questions of interest, and to learn to master them for his compositions. Menny started his mathematical journey in profinite completions of lattice groups, then went on into homogenous dynamics during his post doc years, and is now applying insights from the latter field in equidistribution theory in view of super-singular elliptic curves.
And it is also allegoric for Menny's teaching style, which is clear, passionate and full of innovative techniques. You will see.
We congratulate Menny to his successful habilitation and we are looking forward to his introductory lecture as a Privatdozent at D-MATH today.