Laura Kovács Secures FWF Emerging Fields Programme Grant
FWF Emerging Fields is a funding programme of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) designed to support large, collaborative basic-research projects that explore radically new scientific directions. The programme aims to enable research that has the potential to create new disciplines or fundamentally transform existing ones.
A new interdisciplinary research project titled UnAxiMa – Uncovering the Axioms of Mathematics will investigate one of the most fundamental questions in science: What should the rules of mathematics be? The project brings together leading researchers from TU Wien and the University of Vienna to explore the logical foundations of mathematics using contemporary computational methods.
The primary researchers of the project are Laura Kovács (TU Wien Informatics, CySec) together with Juan P. Aguilera, Sandra Müller, and Michael Pinsker from TU Wien’s faculty of Mathematics and Geoinformation. The team also includes Vera Fischer and Georg Schiemer as primary researchers from the University of Vienna.
The project has a total funding volume of €7 million, with about €4.7 million allocated to TU Wien, and will run for five years.
UnAxiMa integrates perspectives from mathematics, computer science, and philosophy to address the foundations of mathematical reasoning. The project revisits questions that were first systematically explored more than a century ago by the Vienna Circle, whose work on the logical structure of science ultimately led to one of the most influential discoveries in modern mathematics: the Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems developed by Kurt Gödel. Gödel demonstrated that within any sufficiently powerful formal system there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be proven within the system itself. Building on this intellectual legacy, the UnAxiMa project will examine the phenomenon of mathematical incompleteness from a modern perspective. By employing contemporary tools from computation and artificial intelligence, the researchers aim to identify and analyse the underlying axioms that structure mathematical reasoning.
Through this interdisciplinary approach, UnAxiMa seeks to deepen our understanding of the logical foundations of mathematics and to explore how modern computational methods can contribute to uncovering the basic principles on which the discipline ultimately rests.
