Research interests:

• Complexity and information theory
• Mathematical theory of learning in neural networks and cognitive systems
• Graphical models (Bayesian networks) and their application to causality theory
• Information geometry and its applications to complexity and network robustness
• Geometric structure in quantum theory (non-commutative state spaces)

Short Curriculum Vitae

Nihat Ay studied mathematics and physics at the Ruhr University Bochum and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Leipzig University in 2001. In 2003 and 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley). From 2005 to 2021, he worked as a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig where he was heading the group Information Theory of Cognitive Systems. Nihat Ay is an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute, an external faculty member of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, and an honorary professor for information geometry at the Leipzig University. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Information Geometry and has co-authored a comprehensive mathematics book on this subject. In April 2021, he joined the Hamburg University of Technology as a full professor and the head of the newly founded institute for Data Science Foundations. 

Publications

Teaching