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My name is Hendrik Schawe. This site is about the achievements of my short academic career.

I am fascinated by simple models exhibiting an unexpected depth. Examples, which I studied, are the easily defined traveling salesperson problem turning out to be very hard to solve; the complex behavior and surprising properties of simple models, like the self-avoiding random walks following fractal paths or longest increasing subsequences showing surprising connections to random matrix theory and KPZ growth processes. Also phase transitions arising from simple interaction rules spark my interest, like in the Ising model for ferromagnetism or the Hegselmann-Krause model for bounded-confidence opinion dynamics.

Since simulations are my main tool, I am interested in algorithms enabling the study of problems which are on the first glance infeasible, like directly sampling the large deviation regime of an observable with Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, finding exact solutions of moderately sized traveling salesperson instances using linear programming or just pushing the envelope of the system sizes which can be simulated.