Wolfgang Soergel

Wolfgang Soergel is the son of the physicist Volker Soergel and a grandson of the paleontologist Johannes Wolfgang Adolf Werner Soergel (1887–1946).

Wolfgang Soergel (born 12 June 1962 in Geneva) is a German mathematician, specializing in geometry and representation theory.

He spent his youth in Heidelberg, where he passed the Abitur examination in 1980 at the Kurfürst-Friedrich-Gymnasium Heidelberg.

He studied mathematics and physics in Geneva and Bonn and received his Promotion (PhD) in 1988 from the University of Hamburg.

His PhD dissertation Universelle versus relative Einhüllende: Eine geometrische Untersuchung von Quotienten von universellen Einhüllenden halbeinfacher Lie-Algebren (Universal versus relative envelopes: a geometric investigation of quotients of universal envelopes of semi-simple Lie algebras) was supervised by Jens Carsten Jantzen.

After postdoctoral positions at U. C. Berkeley, Harvard University, and MIT, Soergel completed his Habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1991.

In 1994 he was appointed to a professorial chair at the University of Freiburg.

He was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich.

Since 2008 he has been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

He is the author or coauthor of over 30 research articles.

His research in representation theory has important applications to Kazhdan-Lusztig theory and Koszul duality.

The category of Soergel bimodules is named in his honor.

His doctoral students include Peter Fiebig, Catharina Stroppel and Geordie Williamson.