The mathematician Don Zagier recently received the Heinz Gumin Prize, the most valuable German mathematics prize. About a researcher who is considered a superhero by some colleagues and his adventures in the world of numbers.
At the age of 11, Don Zagier had skipped three years of school and was about to start high school in the United States. He liked everything – mathematics, physics, history, French, philosophy – and excelled in everything but German. Only later, when he lived in Germany for more than 50 years, most of that time as director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM) in Bonn, would it become his beloved second language.