Twilight is settling over Lyngby Campus this Thursday evening in mid-September. Though most students have gone home, the auditoriums in Building 208 are still buzzing with life. This autumn, DTU has launched a new collaboration with Københavns Folkeuniversitet, offering 40 different lecture series.
At one end of the corridor, cultural sociologist Emilia van Hauen captivates a packed auditorium with tales of unruly women. At the other end, Associate Professor at DTU Compute Poul Hjorth stands at the blackboard, engaging around 80 women and men in a session on applied mathematics.
Much of the focus is on pi – and how scientists throughout history have competed to determine its ultimate and definitive number of decimal places. From the familiar 3.14, or more precisely 3.14159, the count has now reached well beyond 100 trillion decimals, thanks to powerful computers and algorithms.
A unique opportunity to connect
Poul Hjorth has been at DTU for nearly 36 years and knows the anecdotes of scientific history like few others. True to form, he weaves them into his teaching, much to the amusement of the evening’s mixed crowd of young and old, who listen and laugh.
After a shared coffee break and a couple of hours at the school desks, Poul Hjorth bids the audience “farewell and see you next Thursday,” when the final instalment of his three-part lecture series on applied mathematics will take place.
A researcher as experienced as Poul Hjorth has, of course, seen a great deal over the years. Yet he is struck by how profound the experience has been.
“Folkeuniversitet offers me a unique opportunity to connect with people I wouldn’t normally encounter as a researcher and lecturer at DTU. It’s an exciting challenge to communicate with an audience that isn’t made up of specialists, but who have left their armchairs and come to Campus in the Thursday twilight to learn something about a field,” says Poul Hjorth.
“I find the participants to be cheerful, inquisitive, and they ask truly interesting questions. It’s simply a pleasure, and the experience has left me enriched and renewed in my belief that the spoken word still holds a power that electronic mass media cannot replicate.”
More to come in spring 2026
The lecture series at Folkeuniversitet are designed to be accessible, allowing ordinary citizens without specialist knowledge to learn new things and meet researchers. Before the official launch of “Københavns Folkeuniversitet in Lyngby,” around 5,000 tickets had already been sold. With an average of over 60 participants per event, it surpasses other activities at Københavns Folkeuniversitet.
The success has been so great that additional lectures have been added, and some have been moved to larger venues.
In spring 2026, Københavns Folkeuniversitet will offer 100 lecture series with more than 200 lectures at DTU Lyngby Campus alone. By then, the teaching will move to auditoriums adjacent to DTU Compute, Building 303A at Matematiktorvet. We are looking forward to it.
So is Poul Hjorth, as several researchers have been invited to give another round of lectures in the spring – among them, Poul Hjorth. He is already busy devising a new syllabus filled with anecdotes and methods for calculating pi, using… Well, actually, we won’t reveal that here.
