Richard Pink: farewell lecture

Dear Richard, dear Professor Jan Vermant, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Richard Pink's farewell lecture.

Richard was born in Karlsruhe in 1959, where he also attended high school. He then studied mathematics in Karlsruhe and Bonn. He completed his doctoral studies in Bonn with a thesis on "Arithmetical compactification of mixed Shimura varieties" under the supervision of Günther Harder in 1989, already being an assistant in Bonn and after having spent a year of exchange in Princeton. The thesis, published in Bonner Mathematische Schriften, became a citation classic in the field with very visible 119 citations in MathSciNet. Another proof of the statement: if a work is really great, you do not need to worry so much about where it is published.

Before obtaining his first professorship in Mannheim in 1994, Richard was a Heisenberg Fellow for three years. He spent time in Harvard, Utrecht, Kyoto and Tokyo, as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Since 1999, Richard has been a full professor of mathematics at ETH Zurich.

Richard's research interests lie in modern ramifications of the classical fields of algebra, geometry, and number theory. They come with colourful names like "Adelic openness for Drinfeld modules" or "Cohomological theory of crystals over function fields". Great mathematicians often identify connections between existing theories, they see metaphors lifting them to other levels, which are invisible for the untrained eye. Such as Robert Musil, mathematically trained, observed: "Er sah, dass sie [die Mathematik] in allen Fragen, wo sie sich für zuständig hält, anders denkt als gewöhnliche Menschen": Hodge-Pink structures on function fields of positive characteristics or the Zilber-Pink conjecture, generalising the Mordell-Lang, the Manin-Mumford and the Andre-Oort conjecture, speak volumes on this approach.

Let me highlight some further aspects of Richard's career trajectory: In 2002, Richard was an invited session speaker at the ICM in Beijing on "Hrushovski's proof of the Manin-Mumford conjecture". Richard was Head of Department from 2004 to 2006, when at the same time he had a very active period of his own research. Richard was an active supervisor and mentor. Richard was also strongly involved in the establishment of novel teaching technologies at D-MATH – an always ongoing endeavour for mathematicians, which complements the always beloved evergreen 'chalk and blackboard' of which he is a master, too. And, in 2013, Richard was awarded (jointly with Michael Larsen) the E. H. Moore Research Article Prize of the AMS for their work "Finite Subgroups of Algebraic Groups", where poetic sentences appear, such as: "With this interpretation our use of the word 'general' becomes a direct analogue of the classical one."

We are very much looking forward to further metaphors in Richard's farewell lecture.