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© Johannes Werthebach​/​TU Dortmund, NSF, IceCube

Best Paper Award for Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser and Prof. Dr. Martin Kröger

© Reinhard Schlickeiser, Martin Kröger
Adapted from Figure 2 in Schlickeiser & Kröger, Mathematics 2024, 12(7), 941, MDPI, CC BY 4.0.
The RAPP Center warmly congratulates its founding member Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser and his co-author Prof. Dr. Martin Kröger! Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser (RUB) and Prof. Dr. Martin Kröger (ETH Zürich) have won the Best Paper Award 2026 of the internationally renowned journal Mathematics.

Their joint publication ”Mathematics of Epidemics: On the General Solution of SIRVD, SIRV, SIRD, and SIR Compartment Models”, Mathematics 2024, 12, 941 was selected as the winner by the Mathematics Best Paper Awards Committee based on an overall evaluation of the originality and significance of the papers, considering citations and downloads.

The worldwide Covid-19 corona pandemic that began in 2019 has revived interest in mathematical models for forecasting the temporal evolution of the outbreaks. Particularly popular and successful are compartments (or drawer) models including the susceptible-infectious-recovered/removed (SIR) model invented already in 1927, and their generalizations to account for the effect of vaccinations (SIRV), and deceased persons (SIRVD). These models divide a population into the different drawers S, I, R, V, D, where S denotes the percentage of susceptible persons, I the percentage of infected persons, R the percentage of recovered persons, V the percentage of vaccinated persons, and D the percentage of deceased persons. The generally time-dependent infection, recovery, vaccination, and fatality rates determine the transition rates between the different drawers. 

In the award-winning work, new special exact solutions as well as accurate analytical approximations of compartment models for forecasting epidemics are derived which allow us precise predictions of the course of corona outbreaks by different Covid- 19 mutants such as maximum hospitalization and mortality rates. Moreover, past mutant waves can be used to determine key pandemic parameters of the models.

Prof. Dr. Schlickeiser was Senior Professor at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Ruhr University Bochum until spring 2022. Prior to that, he held the Chair of Theoretical Physics IV (Space and Astrophysics). He was also a founding member of the RAPP Center. Prof. Schlickeiser continues to be closely associated with the faculty and remains actively involved in scientific publications. 

Prof. Dr. Martin Kröger is a Professor of Polymer Physics at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on polymer physics, computational physics, applied mathematics, stochastic differential equations, coarse-graining methods, and biophysics. 

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