There has been peace in the Balkans for 15 years – and yet the story of the war in Bosnia is not over. The “Butcher of Bosnia,” as the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić has been called, is still in detention pending the investigation of his case. The charges against him include complicity in the deaths of 10,000 people during the siege of the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. His trial in The Hague is scheduled to continue in March. The former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who was charged with genocide in the same court, died during the four-year trial. Natalija Bašic is conducting research at Freie Universität on how the tribunal is perceived by residents of former Yugoslavia.

On the scale of popularity among students of all ages, mathematics still lags relatively far behind. Many people feel that the study of numbers, quantities, and figures is too abstract, inaccessible, and not very useful in real life – despite mathematicians’ assertions to the contrary, and despite the excellent career prospects found in the field. “We should make it clear to the public at large what this subject has to offer,” says Ehrhard Behrends, professor of functional analysis and probability theory at Freie Universität.

Countless issues handed down from the ancient world are still just as relevant today. For Professor Klaus Geus, there is a particular fascination with these questions. He came to Freie Universität Berlin last year to teach historical geography of the ancient Mediterranean – a subject taught nowhere else in Germany in this form.