Tim Mesikepp

Research

I study the Loewner equation, Loewner energy, and connections between objects in dynamics and probability theory.

Publications

"Drivers, hitting times and weldings in Loewner's equation.'' With Vlad Margarint. 2023. Journal of the London Mathematical Society., 109 (1) Published version (online reader), arXiv (older version).

"A deterministic approach to Loewner-energy minimizers.'' 2023. Mathematische Zeitschrift, 305, article 59. arXiv.

"M-addition.''Journal Of Mathematical Analysis And Applications 443, Issue 1 (2016): 146-177.

Some quotations on mathematics

I use this space to collect quotations regarding mathematics that I find provocative. They range from the humorous, to the insightful, to the dead serious.

"Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them."
"Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind."
"Mathematics is the rhyme of the universe."
"Banach once told me, 'Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems or theories, the very best ones see analogies between analogies.'"
"The purpose of proof is to understand, not to verify."
"May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as the music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life."
"In analysis you don't work with complicated things, just simple approximations of complicated things."
"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning."
"If you are not prepared to spend a long time (years) on the same question you will never achieve anything deep. But at some point you must throw in the towel."
"The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation of it... it is not at all natural that "laws of nature" exist, much less that man is able to discover them."
"What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to “unlock the secrets of nature” and make a passable attempt at completing nature’s “cryptic crossword.” It would be easy to imagine a world in which the regularities of nature were transparent and obvious to all at a glance. We can also imagine another world in which either there were no regularities, or the regularities were so well hidden, so subtle, that the cosmic code would require vastly more brainpower than humans possess. But instead we find a situation in which the difficulty of the cosmic code seems almost to be attuned to human capabilities. To be sure, we have a pretty tough struggle decoding nature, but so far we have had a good deal of success. The challenge is just hard enough to attract some of the best brains available, but not so hard as to defeat their combined efforts and deflect them onto easier tasks."
"I am not really doing research, just trying to cultivate myself."
"I’m not able to learn mathematics easily, I have to work. It takes a very long time and I have a terrible memory. I forget things. So I try to work, despite these handicaps, and the way I worked was trying to understand really well the simple things.”