How does a swarm of bees find a new home? This complex process takes place without central control and contains elements that are similar to democratic voting in humans. Lessons for human coexistence can be derived from the knowledge gained.
The lecture will be based on Thomas Seeley's book »Honeybee Democracy« (Princeton University Press, 2010), which examines the intelligence of the bee colony. Furthermore, elements of the book »The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka« (Princeton University Press, 2022) will be addressed, which focuses on the intelligence of the individual bee.
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lengauer (Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken)
Thomas Lengauer is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. He studied mathematics at the Free University of Berlin and computer science at Stanford University. In the seventies he devoted himself to theoretical research in computer science, in the eighties he developed methods for the design of highly integrated circuits. In the 1990s, he made a significant contribution to the development of bioinformatics as a scientific discipline. From 1984 to 1992, Thomas Lengauer was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Paderborn, from 1992 to 2001 he was Director at the Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing at the GMD – Research Center for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin near Bonn and Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn. From 2001 to 2018, he was Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken.
Thomas Lengauer is a founding member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and was its president from 2018 to 2021. In 2003, he received the Konrad Zuse Medal of the German Informatics Society and the Karl-Heinz Beckurts Prize, in 2010 the AIDS Research Prize of the Heinz-Ansmann Foundation and in 2014 the Hector Science Prize. He has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2003 and a member of the Presidium since 2015.
The event will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Küfer. He is the spokesperson of the Felix Klein Center for Mathematics and head of the division »Optimization« and the department »Optimization in the Life Sciences« at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM.