We’re delighted to announce that the project Uncovering the Axioms of Mathematics, or UnAxiMa for short, has been selected for funding by the FWF Emerging Fields scheme!

The Emerging Fields program of the Austrian Science Fund FWF supports teams of outstanding researchers pursuing pioneering basic research that deliberately departs from established approaches. It is designed to enable particularly high-risk ideas with the potential to trigger paradigm shifts within or across scientific fields. The program is specifically encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations, arts-based research using aesthetic or artistic methods, and transdisciplinary projects involving non-academic participants.

One of the projects that was selected in this round of funding is UnAxiMa, with Laura Kovács from TU Wien Informatics, and Juan P. Aguilera, Sandra Müller, and Michael Pinsker from TU Wien as key researchers. The other primary researchers are Vera Fischer and Georg Schiemer, both from the University of Vienna. The project has a total funding volume of around €7 million, with approximately €5 million allocated to TU Wien, and a duration of five years.

UnAxiMa is an interdisciplinary project that integrates mathematics, computer science, and philosophy to explore one of the most fundamental questions in science: What should the rules of mathematics be? This question was first examined over a century ago by the Vienna Circle, a group of leading philosophers and scientists. Their work culminated in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, a landmark achievement in the foundations of mathematics, revealing the existence of questions that cannot be resolved within the established rules of the discipline. Building on this legacy and enriched by contemporary developments such as computation and artificial intelligence, UnAxiMa revisits the phenomenon of incompleteness from a modern perspective, with the aim of uncovering the axioms of mathematics.

Congratulations, Laura Kovács, Juan P. Aguilera, Vera Fischer, Sandra Müller, Michael Pinsker, and Georg Schiemer on this extraordinary achievement!

About Laura Kovács

Laura Kovács is a Professor and Head of the Research Unit Formal Methods in Systems Engineering at TU Wien Informatics, where she leads the Automated Program Reasoning (APRe) group. Her research focuses on the design and development of new theories, technologies, and tools for program analysis, with a particular focus on automated assertion generation, symbolic summation, computer algebra, and automated theorem proving. She is the co-developer of the Vampire theorem prover and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow of Sweden. Her research has been awarded with an ERC Starting Grant (2014), two ERC Proof of Concept Grants (2018, 2025), an ERC Consolidator Grant (2020), and two Amazon Research Awards (2020 and 2023). She receives financial support from LEA (Let’s empower Austria) to promote and organize unplugged computer science workshops for elementary school children as part of TU Wien’s eduLAB.

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