Michael Bleher

Mathematikon 02/232

Im Neuenheimer Feld 205

69120 Heidelberg

Hi, I’m a Postdoc based at the Institute for Mathematics, Heidelberg University, and associated with STRUCTURES and the ERC Grant Perpetuating Stemness.

I obtained a PhD in Mathematical Physics on connections between topologically twisted supersymmetric field theories, Floer theories, and knot homologies under the supervision of Johannes Walcher.

Currently I’m investigating applications of geometry and topology in biology, with the ultimate goal of extracting dynamical information from single cell RNA velocity data during cell differentiation. This research is part of the Applied Analysis and Modelling in Biosciences group of Anna Marciniak-Czochra and developed in collaboration with Anna Wienhard at the MPI MiS.

In general, I’m fascinated by the unreasonable effectiveness of abstract mathematics in the natural sciences and vice versa. I’m always happy to chat about new examples and am looking forward to seeing Wigner being proven right again and again.

A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. – Eugene Wigner

news

Jan 16, 2026	New preprint: A Riemannian Autocorrelation Function and its Application to Non-Local Isoperimetric Energies with Denis Brazke and Sebastian Nill is now on arXiv. We generalize Matheron’s covariogram to Riemannian manifolds using the geodesic flow and prove Γ-convergence results for non-local isoperimetric energies on spheres.
Dec 14, 2025	I’ll be participating in ATMCS 12 in Leipzig. I’ll contribute a flash talk on The Tangled Web They Weave: Exploring Polysemantic Neurons with Directed Topology.
Dec 14, 2025	I’ll be talking about Topological Signatures of Convergence in Viral Evolution at the Dioscuri TDA Seminar on January 13th, 2026. Slides are available here.
Nov 19, 2025	I’ll be presenting some early work on Euler characteristic profiles of single cell data at the Velten Group Seminar on ~~November 27th, 2025.~~ Cancelled due to illness. New date: January 20th, 2026. Slides.
Nov 9, 2025	At last: it’s the week of GTML 2025, 10-14 Nov, MPI MiS Leipzig.