Dr. Lauren Niu is awarded with the Mario Markus Prize 2025 for her innovative insights into the geometry of knit fabrics. She discovered that even simple stitches, such as knit and purl, lead to complex geometric patterns. Instead of modeling the material at the level of individual stitches, she created swatches, large-scale models, and hand-knitted fabrics. She observed that the swatches tend to roll up to generate Gaussian curvature. She proposed that knit fabrics could be modeled as thin elastic sheets that maintain their area while forming saddle points, with orientations varying between knit and purl.
Her playful approach to research reflects the criteria for which the Mario Markus Prize is awarded.

• Field: Ludic Natural Sciences
• Consists of: 10 000 €, travel expenses, certificate
• First awarded: 2022

Prof. Dr. Mario Markus is the donor of the award. He grew up as a child of German parents in Chile, where he studied mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. In 1965, he continued his studies of mathematics and physics in Heidelberg, where he also received his doctorate in 1973. Prof. Markus did research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main in 1974 before he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Nutritional Physiology (now MPI for Molecular Physiology) in Dortmund in 1975 as a research associate in the department of biochemist and biophysicist Benno Hess. In 1988, he habilitated at the University of Dortmund, where he worked first as a Privatdozent and from 1997 as an associate professor. Prof. Markus has led his own research group at the MPI of Molecular Physiology since 1993.