The mathematics department at University of California Berkeley (UCB) is consistently ranked among the several top departments in the United States. In addition to the pooling of postdocs with UCB, there have been exchange programs involving Danish PhD students and postdocs spending extensive periods at UCB and likewise UCB students and postdocs with shorter visits to QGM. The interaction between Aarhus and UCB is by now well established through the Niels Bohr professor ship of Nicolai Reshetikhin at Aarhus and continued through the construction of QGM, invoking Berkeley as an international hub of the centre. This will now be further extended with the addition of Professor Denis Auroux, a world expert in symplectic geometry and Mirror symmetry and Professor Edward Frenkel, a world expert in the geometric Langlands program. Nicolai Reshetikhin is the Chern-Simons Professor of Mathematical Physics at UCB and Professor at University of Amsterdam. He continues his visits to and close cooperations with QGM. Reshetikhin is a leading world-authority on quantum integrable systems, quantum representation theory and its application to the study of 3-dimensional topology and quantization of moduli spaces. Jointly with Turaev, he laid the foundation for this field in the late eighties/early nineties, and he continues to be a major world figure in this area, currently working on quantum groups, quantization of moduli spaces, and invariants of 3-manifolds. He received the Humboldt Research Award in 2004 and gave invited addresse at the ICM-1990 in Kyoto. He gave plenary talks at the European Congress of Mathematicians in 2008, and at the ICM in 2010.
