Pär Kurlberg

I am a professor at the department of mathematics at KTH. My main research interest is Number Theory related to Quantum Chaos. Abridged CV.

Distinctions

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Member, 2023-.
Gårding prize, 2021.
Göran Gustafsson Prize, 2010.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Research Fellowship, 2004-2009.
Edlund Prize, 2008.
"Feather in the hat" teaching award, Spring 2007.
Göran Gustafsson junior research award, 2005.
Wallenberg Prize, 2002.

Research

Teaching

SF1633 (SF1633 ht19) Old courses. Articles on teaching.

Why study math?

You can do some deep stuff.
According to the Economist, TAKING more maths in school can make you richer. In swedish: Matematikstudier ger 30 procent högre lön.
Fighting nazis (another way, in swedish.)
To stay upwind. Paul Graham also has some interesting essays on startups.
Get rich: First way. Second way.
No pain, no gain: "The fact is, if you are thinking about a PhD program in economics, you are advised to take math courses until it hurts."
Gian-Carlo Rota's Lesson 10: Alumni who return to visit [MIT] invariably complain of not having taken enough math courses while they were undergraduates
Since it is unreasonably effective.
Apparently it's the best job there is!
A secret weapon, The Maths of life and death.

"Maths is the language of science. It crops up everywhere from physics to engineering and chemistry – aiding us in understanding the origins of the universe and building bridges that won’t collapse in the wind. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, maths is also increasingly integral to biology."

Seminars/Workshops/Conferences

Institut Mittag-Leffler semester on Number Theory (spring 2024)
Number Theory Session, 29 NCM, Aalborg, 2023
Number Theory Session, 28 NCM, Aalto, 2022
Institut Mittag-Leffler semester on Number Theory (spring 2021)
KTH/SU number theory mailing list
KTH/SU Number theory seminar
KTH analysis seminar
Number theory session at the 17th Nordic Congress (Stockholm, March 17-19, 2016)
Number theory miniworkshop (Sep 21, 2010).
Dynamical systems, Number theory, Analysis (DNA)
DNA-L ("L" is for "light" or "learning".)
KTH/SU Mathematics Colloquium
Finnish-Swedish Number Theory Conference (May 26-28, 2010).
CIAM/DNA mini-workshop on Computational Number Theory (May 15, 2008)
Exponential sum working group (Spring 2007)
DNA Workshop (April 14, 2005)

Contact information

Office: room 3627, Mathematics, KTH
Email: My last name at math.kth.se. (Spam problems.)
Phone: +46 (0)8 790 6582
Fax:   +46 (0)8 723 1788

Mailing address:
Par Kurlberg
Department of Mathematics
KTH
SE-10044, Stockholm
Sweden

GnuPG key

Misc computer notes

Information about the department compute servers.

How to get a list of students in your course (with email + pnr etc), and how to get names + pnr for "all" students that took an exam.

Hint and tips for KTH room booking via exchange.

Latex template for KTH math letters.

Some other KTH computer notes.

Secure shell

Some links

(Mostly to help google do the right.)

lokalbokning (old KTH lokalbokning)

Quotes

During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of facts.
In 1976, still back in the USSR, I got a very serious case of food poisoning from eating raw fish. While in the hospital, in the state of delirium, I suddenly realized that the ability to add numbers in parallel depends on the fact that addition is associative. (So, putting it simply, STL is the result of a bacterial infection.) In other words, I realized that a parallel reduction algorithm is associated with a semigroup structure type.
In short, the mathematics of self-organizing lists suggests something radical: the big pile of papers on your desk, far from being a guilt-inducing fester of chaos, is actually one of the most well-designed and efficient structures available. What might appear to others to be an unorganized mess is, in fact, a self-organizing mess. Tossing things back on the top of the pile is the very best you can do, shy of knowing the future. You don’t need to organize that unsorted pile of paper. You already have.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.