Vol.2, Issue No. 1. September 2003

Funded by The Danish National Research Foundation

Morten Skarsholm Risager

My name is Morten Skarsholm Risager. I was born in the northern part of Jutland in the spring of 1973. Twenty years later I entered the University of Aarhus where I studied philosophy, physics and mathematics. In 1996 I married my wife Sigrid and around the same time I decided that mathematics was going to be my major. In 1999 I was accepted into the mathematics PhD program under the supervision of Erik Balslev and eventually co-supervised by Alexei B. Venkov. In the first semester of 2002 my family - my wife, our son Karl and myself - was in Bonn where I studied at the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics. Most of the main results of my thesis started to materialize during this stay and in spring 2003 I defended my thesis entitled "Automorphic forms and modular symbols". In June and July I had the pleasure of being a postdoc at MaPhySto, and afterwards I became an assistant professor (Adjunkt) at the mathematics department at the University of Aarhus. Besides research I am involved in the development of a mathematical laboratory intended for first year undergraduate students at the science faculty.

My main research interests are Riemann surfaces, analytic number theory and the spectral theory of automorphic forms. In particular I have been studying the value distribution of the Poincare pairing between homology and cohomology in different settings. It turns out that for a fixed cohomology class this pairing is often normally distributed if one makes the correct normalization and ordering. I am also very interested in understanding the arithmetical importance of various functions whose spectral significance is evident.

Further information can be found at my personal webpage: http://home.imf.au.dk/risager/

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