We are happy to announce that Jonathan Tilling Niemann will start as a PhD student in the algebra group. The planned starting date is the 15th of March this year. Jonathan studied mathematics at KU and defended his master’s thesis today with great success obtaining the maximal grade. His PhD project will be supervised by Peter and Maria.
Jonathan will work within the area of maximal curves defined over a finite field. These are algebraic curves that attain the famous Hasse-Weil bound. Such curves are particularly interesting from the point of error-correcting codes as well. In recent years several new families of maximal curves have been found (among others a family discovered by Peter and Maria that is now called the Beelen-Montanucci family of maximal curves). Jonathan’s project is about finding common properties of these families and, if possible, to use the gained insights to find new families of maximal curves. The resulting impact in the area of error-correcting codes will be investigated as well.