Ilka Agricola

Life and work

Agricola studied physics at the Technical University of Munich and LMU Munich from 1991 to 1996. After a guest stay at Rutgers University in New Jersey (United States) that lasted until the end of 1997 she went to the Humboldt University of Berlin, where in 2000 she earned a mathematics doctorate under Thomas Friedrich.

From 2003 to 2008, she led one of the Volkswagen Foundation funded research groups at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the field of special geometries in mathematical physics. From 2004 to 2008, she was a project manager in the priority program for string theory at the German Research Foundation and the Collaborative Research Center 1080. Agricola took the Habilitation in 2004 at the University of Greifswald in mathematics. In 2008, she was appointed full professor at Marburg University. From November 2014 until October 2018, she has been Dean of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She was president of the German Mathematical Society from 2021 to 2022.

Agricola is Editor-in-Chief of two academic journals in mathematics published by Springer Science+Business Media, Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry (since 2015) and Mathematische Semesterberichte (since 2021). She is an editor of the journal Communications in Mathematics published by De Gruyter.

As of September 2025, Agricola is chair of the Committee on Publishing of the International Mathematical Union.