The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is the result of a joint initiative of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and the Klaus Tschira Stiftung. The KTS and the HITS were brought to fruition by physicist and co-founder of SAP, Klaus Tschira (1940 – 2015). The latter has been a supporter of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings for many years, and the experience of this event spawned the idea of creating something similar for the two crucial scientific disciplines Mathematics and Computer Science.

The idea was initially discussed in late 2011 with representatives of the “Mathematisches Forschungszentrum Oberwolfach”, the “Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics” as well as individual laureates. Since the response was uniformly positive, a formal proposal was submitted to the organizations granting the Abel Prize (Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters), the Fields Medal (International Mathematical Union), and the ACM Turing Award (Association for Computing Machinery). A preparatory meeting was held in Heidelberg on February 7, 2012, which resulted in a recommendation to the award-granting institutions to endorse an annual meeting for laureates of the three prizes with young scientists to be held in Heidelberg, organized by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies.

The following snapshots of modern mathematics were included in the conference bags:

No. 9/2016: Polyhedra and commensurability
Rafael Guglielmetti, Matthieu Jacquemet

No. 6/2016: High performance computing on smartphones
Anthony T. Patera, Karsten Urban

No. 1/2016: Swarming robots
Magnus Egerstedt

No. 9/2015: How to choose a winner: the mathematics of social choice
Victoria Powers

No. 5/2015: Chaos and chaotic fluid mixing
Tom Solomon

No. 4/2015: Friezes and tilings
Thorsten Holm

No. 1/2015: Billiards and flat surfaces
Diana Davis

No. 10/2014: Drugs, herbicides, and numerical simulation
Peter Benner, Hermann Mena, René Schneider

No. 8/2014: The Kadison-Singer Problem
Alain Valette

No. 5/2014: Arrangements of lines
Brian Harbourne, Thomas Szemberg

No. 3/2014: The ternary Goldbach Problem
Harald Helfgott