Paul Bergold is "Mathemacher"

Our doctorate student Paul Bergold has been awarded the title Mathemacher - which translates roughly as "Math-Doer" - for the Winter 2021. With this title, the German Mathematicians Association (Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung - DMV) honors mathematicians who, through their engagement and creative ideas, function as ambassadors for the field and help to create enthusiasm for mathematics as a whole.  

Paul Bergold has achieved this status through his work within the educational company ABIcrash, which supports young people with their preparations for their Math A-Levels. In the course of their research, the DMV became aware of his work.  

Mathematical learning material – accurate and understandable

Since 2018, Paul Bergold has been working as a script author and quality manager for ABIcrash, a young start-up company, which specializes in crash courses for preparation for the Math A-Level examinations throughout Germany. His aim: to develop easily understandable, accurate teaching content, which is presented in a modern way and adapted to suit the different requirements and performance standards of all the German federal states.  

To achieve this he and his team created, amongst others, free checklists for each federal state, in which A-level students can read about the most important themes in their senior classes, as well as about corona-induced changes in the teaching plans. For this ambitious project, they studied all the teaching plans of the different states and scrutinized the questions set in previous A-level examination papers.  

Varied approach to learning math

In order to develop successful learning material for mathematical themes, Paul Bergold works together with a team of mathematicians, teachers, and artists. Together, they develop learning concepts which present mathematics in a diverse and understandable manner, enabling learning processes to be more fun, and therefore generally more successful. 

As a "Mathemacher" Paul Bergold feels it is important to have a creative approach to mathematics and, in this way, to share his knowledge with other curious people. Alongside his work for AIRCrash, he is currently studying for his doctorate under the supervision of Caroline Lasser, Professor for Numerics of Partial Differential Equations at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is working on numerical processes to solve the Schrödinger equation.

If you want to find out more about Paul Bergold: on the DMV website there is an interview with the Mathemacher of Winter 2021 (German only). By the way: Mathemacher of Summer 2021 was the TUM Professor for Geometry and Visualization, Jürgen Richter-Gebert, who inspires people of all ages for math though his numerous visual projects and for which he received the Communicator Award 2021.