many companies are currently pushing through long-planned mass redundancies and site closures in addition to VW Baunatal and Opel/Stellantis this particularly affects the automotive suppliers Schaeffler and Continental The latest IG Metall contract in the metal and electrical industries which guarantees two years of “industrial peace,” has given management the green light Continental plans to close its sites in Schwalbach am Taunus and Wetzlar by the end of 2025 Some of the workforce there are to move to Frankfurt or Babenhausen with 630 jobs also being destroyed at the Frankfurt site One hundred and ten jobs are also to be cut in Babenhausen Continental is cutting 1,200 of the remaining 8,000 jobs in the region and 1,100 workers are to be forced to relocate Continental plans to cut 7,150 jobs worldwide in order to reduce personnel costs by €400 million annually an important manufacturer of drive technology has also announced job cuts in Schwalbach am Taunus Schaeffler only took over Vitesco Technologies Group AG the automotive supplier spun off from Continental Schaeffler announced 139 job cuts at Vitesco in Schwalbach The company plans to cut 3,700 jobs across Europe wants to “utilise synergies” and “increase the savings potential to €290 million per year” over five years—in other words: lay off employees There is great anger and a willingness to fight among those impacted A faint reflection of this can even occasionally be seen in the local press a young Continental worker from Wetzlar told Hessenschau regional news programme “All our plans for the future have been turned upside down now have a child and wanted to build a house Another called it a “slap in the face,” adding “It’s sad that this is coming to an end.” Employees in administration research and development have been particularly hard hit In the protests and warning strikes of recent weeks and months, the workforce has been almost totally united. There can be no doubt about their determination to fight. However, IG Metall is refusing to lead the necessary fight. It made this clear with its latest wage agreement where it committed to preventing industrial action at least until the early elections in February has been a deputy chairwoman on Continental’s Supervisory Board for years at an annual salary of €270,000 With its officials in the pay of management IG Metall blocked any resistance three and a half years ago when Continental destroyed over 10,000 jobs and flattened its large Aachen plant Many still remember the dispute at Continental in Karben and other branches in Hesse At no point did IG Metall organise serious industrial action uniting workers at all locations it helped ensure the closure of one location after another Karben will also be finally wound up next year Workers must draw definite conclusions from this experience independent rank-and-file action committees to overcome the division fostered by IG Metall between sites groups and sectors and unite all employees The ultimate goal must be to take control of such important global production companies themselves to put them at the service of society and to expropriate their current owners These owners and their managers are waging a ruthless class war The so-called “social partnership” has turned into a one-way street: The trade union ensures that any resistance is nipped in the bud The attacks on jobs and wages are part of a global capitalist offensive and a new wave of trade war paving the way for armed conflict The captains of industry and shareholders belong to a class of the super-rich This applies above all to Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler and her son Georg Schaeffler who are in 27th place on the list of the 500 richest Germans The Schaeffler family is also the main shareholder of Continental AG and recently acquired its spun-off automotive division Vitesco The management boards of both companies were paid bonuses totalling millions Continental shareholders decided to pay out around €440 million in dividends 46 percent—more than €200 million euros—will once again end up in the Schaeffler family’s bank account Both Continental and Schaeffler owe the origins of their wealth to crimes committed under Nazi rule culminating in the Second World War The origins of the Schaeffler fortune also goes back to the Nazi era which was officially founded in Herzogenaurach in 1940 actually had a Jewish predecessor: the “Davistan Krimmer Plüsch und Teppichfabriken AG” owned by the Frank family which was quickly renamed “Wilhelm Schaeffler AG,” also produced armaments for the Wehrmacht during the war and profited from the proximity of its owners the direct ancestors of the current owners the struggle in defence of jobs and wages is once again inextricably linked to the fight against war and military rearmament It must be waged internationally and on a socialist basis IG Metall stands on the other side in this struggle We therefore call on all Continental and Schaeffler employees: Take part in the formation of rank-and-file action committees Get in touch via Whatsapp message at +491633378340 or fill out the form below German colocation firm Maincubes has launched its second data center in Frankfurt In a recent LinkedIn post the company unveiled its completed FRA02 facility in Schwalbach near Frankfurt the facility offers 7.4MW of IT capacity across 4,700 sqm (50,590 sq ft) of IT white space The facility has a cooling wall system that uses large heat exchangers with chilled water flowing through them for air conditioning The data center also uses a rotating UPS system - known as an isolated parallel bus - and a kinetic flywheel energy storage unit in place of a battery Plans for the FRA02 facility were first announced in July 2021 and construction began a year later the company said that a public sector IT client had already committed to taking up part of the facility upon completion Majority-owned by Digital Transformation Capital Partners since September last year Maincubes currently operates the FRA01 data center in Frankfurt and another in Amsterdam in the Netherlands The company has also announced plans for a third and fourth data center in Frankfurt and its first in Berlin This comes after Maincubes secured more than €1 billion ($1.07bn) in debt financing to fund its expansion plans in 2023 The company also signed a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement with energy provider Stadtwerke Gottingen AG for its third Frankfurt facility In 2015 Keppel DC REIT acquired a then yet-to-be-constructed Maincubes data center in Offenbach Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia Create a reading list by clicking the Read Later icon next to the articles you wish to save Thomas Royen at his home in Schwalbach am Taunus Rüdiger Nehmzow for Quanta Magazine As he was brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17 a little-known retired German statistician suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry probability theory and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades Known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI), the conjecture originated in the 1950s, was posed in its most elegant form in 1972 and has held mathematicians in its thrall ever since. “I know of people who worked on it for 40 years,” said Donald Richards a statistician at Pennsylvania State University Royen hadn’t given the Gaussian correlation inequality much thought before the “raw idea” for how to prove it came to him over the bathroom sink Formerly an employee of a pharmaceutical company he had moved on to a small technical university in Bingen in 1985 in order to have more time to improve the statistical formulas that he and other industry statisticians used to make sense of drug-trial data still at work on his formulas as a 67-year-old retiree Royen found that the GCI could be extended into a statement about statistical distributions he had long specialized in he saw how to calculate a key derivative for this extended GCI that unlocked the proof my first draft of the proof was written,” he said Not knowing LaTeX, the word processer of choice in mathematics, he typed up his calculations in Microsoft Word, and the following month he posted his paper to the academic preprint site arxiv.org who had briefly circulated his own failed attempt at a proof of the GCI a year and a half earlier “I got this article by email from him,” Richards said “And when I looked at it I knew instantly that it was solved.” he and other experts had been attacking the GCI with increasingly sophisticated mathematical methods certain that bold new ideas in convex geometry probability theory or analysis would be needed to prove it had come to suspect the inequality was actually false filling just a few pages and using only classic techniques Richards was shocked that he and everyone else had missed it “But on the other hand I have to also tell you that when I saw it “I remember thinking to myself that I was glad to have seen it before I died.” He laughed When he checked one of them and found a mistake Proofs of obscure provenance are sometimes overlooked at first but usually not for long: A major paper like Royen’s would normally get submitted and published somewhere like the Annals of Statistics chose to skip the slow and often demanding peer-review process typical of top journals He opted instead for quick publication in the Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics that was largely unknown to experts and which rather suspiciously listed Royen as an editor (He had agreed to join the editorial board the year before.) still hadn’t heard about the proof when asked for comment last month news of Royen’s proof managed to travel so slowly “It was clearly a lack of communication in an age where it’s very easy to communicate,” Klartag said at least we found it,” he added — and “it’s beautiful.” In its most famous form, formulated in 1972 the GCI links probability and geometry: It places a lower bound on a player’s odds in a game of darts including hypothetical dart games in higher dimensions centered on a point that serves as the target Darts thrown at the target will land in a bell curve or “Gaussian distribution” of positions around the center point The Gaussian correlation inequality says that the probability that a dart will land inside both the rectangle and the circle is always as high as or higher than the individual probability of its landing inside the rectangle multiplied by the individual probability of its landing in the circle striking one increases your chances of also striking the other The same inequality was thought to hold for any two convex symmetrical shapes with any number of dimensions centered on a point Special cases of the GCI have been proved — in 1977, for instance, Loren Pitt of the University of Virginia established it as true for two-dimensional convex shapes — but the general case eluded all mathematicians who tried to prove it when he first heard about the inequality over lunch with colleagues at a meeting in Albuquerque “Being an arrogant young mathematician … I was shocked that grown men who were putting themselves off as respectable math and science people didn’t know the answer to this,” he said He locked himself in his motel room and was sure he would prove or disprove the conjecture before coming out “Fifty years or so later I still didn’t know the answer,” he said Despite hundreds of pages of calculations leading nowhere Pitt and other mathematicians felt certain — and took his 2-D proof as evidence — that the convex geometry framing of the GCI would lead to the general proof “I had developed a conceptual way of thinking about this that perhaps I was overly wedded to,” Pitt said “And what Royen did was kind of diametrically opposed to what I had in mind.” Royen’s proof harkened back to his roots in the pharmaceutical industry, and to the obscure origin of the Gaussian correlation inequality itself. Before it was a statement about convex symmetrical shapes, the GCI was conjectured in 1959 by the American statistician Olive Dunn as a formula for calculating “simultaneous confidence intervals,” or ranges that multiple variables are all estimated to fall in Suppose you want to estimate the weight and height ranges that 95 percent of a given population fall in If you plot people’s weights and heights on an x–y plot the weights will form a Gaussian bell-curve distribution along the x-axis and heights will form a bell curve along the y-axis the weights and heights follow a two-dimensional bell curve what are the weight and height ranges — call them –w < x < w and –h < y < h — such that 95 percent of the population will fall inside the rectangle formed by these ranges you could just calculate the individual odds of a given weight falling inside –w < x < w and a given height falling inside –h < y < h then multiply them to get the odds that both conditions are satisfied if someone’s weight lands in the normal range that person is more likely to have a normal height generalizing an inequality posed three years earlier conjectured the following: The probability that both Gaussian random variables will simultaneously fall inside the rectangular region is always greater than or equal to the product of the individual probabilities of each variable falling in its own specified range (This can be generalized to any number of variables.) If the variables are independent then the joint probability equals the product of the individual probabilities But any correlation between the variables causes the joint probability to increase Royen found that he could generalize the GCI to apply not just to Gaussian distributions of random variables but to more general statistical spreads related to the squares of Gaussian distributions which are used in certain statistical tests it occurs frequently that a seemingly difficult special problem can be solved by answering a more general question,” he said Royen represented the amount of correlation between variables in his generalized GCI by a factor we might call C and he defined a new function whose value depends on C When C = 0 (corresponding to independent variables like weight and eye color) the function equals the product of the separate probabilities When you crank up the correlation to the maximum To prove that the latter is bigger than the former and the GCI is true Royen needed to show that his function always increases as C increases His familiarity with gamma distributions sparked his bathroom-sink epiphany He knew he could apply a classic trick to transform his function into a simpler function he recognized that the derivative of this transformed function was equivalent to the transform of the derivative of the original function He could easily show that the latter derivative was always positive “He had formulas that enabled him to pull off his magic,” Pitt said Any graduate student in statistics could follow the arguments Royen said he hopes the “surprisingly simple proof … might encourage young students to use their own creativity to find new mathematical theorems,” since “a very high theoretical level is not always required.” which would help explain strange new facts in convex geometry that are only de facto implied by Royen’s analytic proof the GCI defines an interesting relationship between vectors on the surfaces of overlapping convex shapes which could blossom into a new subdomain of convex geometry “At least now we know it’s true,” he said of the vector relationship But “if someone could see their way through this geometry we’d understand a class of problems in a way that we just don’t today.” Richards said a variation on the inequality could help statisticians better predict the ranges in which variables like stock prices fluctuate over time the GCI proof now permits exact calculations of rates that arise in “small-ball” probabilities which are related to the random paths of particles moving in a fluid Richards says he has conjectured a few inequalities that extend the GCI and which he might now try to prove using Royen’s approach Royen’s main interest is in improving the practical computation of the formulas used in many statistical tests — for instance for determining whether a drug causes fatigue based on measurements of several variables such as patients’ reaction time and body sway He said that his extended GCI does indeed sharpen these tools of his old trade and that some of his other recent work related to the GCI has offered further improvements Royen wasn’t particularly disappointed or surprised “I am used to being frequently ignored by scientists from [top-tier] German universities,” he wrote in an email “I am not so talented for ‘networking’ and many contacts I do not need these things for the quality of my life.” The “feeling of deep joy and gratitude” that comes from finding an important proof has been reward enough “We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly an angel — [which] stands here poetically for the mysteries of our neurons — brings a good idea.” This article was reprinted on Wired.com Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English We’ll email you instructions to reset your password Company continues work on 4,500 sqm 7.2 MW facility Maincubes has laid the foundation stone for a new data center outside Frankfurt The company recently announced the laying of the foundation stone for the new FRA02 in Schwalbach near Frankfurt The company announced plans for its second Frankfurt facility, FRA02, in July 2021 the laying of the foundation stone was delayed due to Covid-19 Update: Maincubes reached out to DCD to clarify the facility is now due to have 4,500 sqm (48,400 sq ft) of IT white space and 7.2MW of IT capacity The data center is due to come online in mid-2023 "Planning a data center architecturally and building it and aligning it to the specific requirements of the user - this is a complex matter but it runs really smoothly and constructively here," said Oliver Menzel "We have found a very good location for our FRA02 many thanks for the constructive cooperation to the Schwalbach City Council and Mayor Immisch Many thanks to ICT Facilities for the planning The German state’s federal IT service ITZBund is due to be an anchor tenant of the facility with maincubes saying FRA2 will be built to the agency’s sustainability and climate protection standards Different waste heat concepts are reportedly being planned: "Our aim is to achieve the best possible in terms of sustainability and at the same time maximum security for our data centers,” said Albrecht Kraas Mayor of the city of Schwalbach added: "We welcome maincubes with its data center to the business location Schwalbach am Taunus considers the ecological factor to be so important and takes it into account It is our great pleasure that the main user of the building is a federal institution and that the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund) will soon be moving in.” Part of German construction conglomerate Zech Group, Maincubes currently operates the FRA01 data center in Frankfurt, and another in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 2015 Keppel DC REIT acquired a then yet-to-be constructed Maincubes data center in Offenbach Earlier this year the company announced plans for a third facility in Frankfurt and its first in Berlin Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia Notifications can be managed in browser preferences. Thomas Royen found the solution at the age of 67 while brushing his teeth I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice A retired German man has found the proof to a complex geometry and probability problem that experts have tried to solve for decades only for his achievement to go largely unnoticed Thomas Royen was reportedly brushing his teeth when he struck upon an idea in July 2014 the former statistician for a pharmaceutical company known as the Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI) But at the time, Mr Royen’s cogent solution had gone largely unheralded and is still slowly permeating the scientific community, Quanta Magazine reports The GCI conjecture originates in the 1950s but was more clearly formulated in the 1972 scores of mathematicians have unsuccessfully tried to solve it increases the chances of also striking the other Donald Richards, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University told the science magazine he had been working on trying to solve the equations for 30 years without success Mr Royen is not one those who have spent most of their life working to explain the conjuncture His primary aim was to improve statistical formulas for the pharmaceutical industry to make sense of drug trial data it dawn on him that GCI could be analytically explained through statistical formulas This enabled him to simplify his function and use equations he had worked with all his life it occurs frequently that a seemingly difficult special problem can be solved by answering a more general question my first draft of the proof was written,” he told Quanta His answer, compiled in a paper called "A simple proof of the Gaussian correlation conjecture" is short and only uses classic mathematical techniques Experts said that any graduate student would be able to follow Mr Royen’s argument And Mr Royen said he hoped the “surprisingly simple proof … might encourage young students to use their own creativity to find new mathematical theorems” adding that “a very high theoretical level is not always required” The retired statistician wrote up his solution on Microsoft Word rather than using the go-to maths software, LaTeX. He published his findings on the academic preprint website arxiv.org and emailed a copy to Mr Richards who said he “knew instantly” the problem had been solved But other experts were dismissive to Mr Royen’s claim he had found the solution False and flawed solutions of the GCI have been floating in recent years Mr Royen reportedly sent his findings to Bo’az Klartag of the Weizmann at the Institute of Science and Tel Aviv University. But his solution arrived in a batch with three other papers and when Mr Klartag found a mistake in one of them, he allegedly overlooked the two others for lack of time. With no intentions of bothering with peer reviews and the time-consuming process to get his paper published in top academic journals, Mr Royen’s achievement continued to go unrecognised. But the retired man said the “feeling of deep joy and gratitude” that came from finding an important proof has been reward enough. “It is like a kind of grace. We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly an angel—[which] stands here poetically for the mysteries of our neurons—brings a good idea,” he said. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Few details given about timeline or target market A new data center joint venture plans to build and operate facilities in Germany Data Castle has started construction on its first data center in the town of Schwalbach am Taunus The 25MVA data center is the first in what the company calls the 'Green Data Center - Platform.' Data Castle is a new joint venture between global alternative investment firm Angelo Gordon and data center development management company DCD Data Center Developers (editor's note: the company has no relation to DCD) of boutique advisory firm DCA Data Center Advisors "With the increasing demand for colocation and cloud solutions in Europe we believe this is an ideal time to launch an innovative and we are confident that Angelo Gordon is the right partner for this endeavor," Dr Data Castle is well positioned to become a predominant player in the heart of Europe’s data center market.” Reius and Ernst & Young acted as advisors on the joint venture Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia