Jörn Stöhler

Jörn Stöhler is a German mathematical physicist turned AI safety researcher. As a schoolboy he was a four-time winner of the Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik and represented Germany at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2013 and 2015, taking bronze both times. He went on to study physics and mathematics at LMU Munich and RWTH Aachen and did doctoral work at Forschungszentrum Jülich before moving into mechanistic interpretability, co-authoring 'The Local Interaction Basis' (2024) and contributing to 'Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability' (2025). He publishes and posts on alignment and interpretability as an independent researcher.

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• Co-author on 'The Local Interaction Basis: Identifying Computationally-Relevant and Sparsely Interacting Features in Neural Networks' (arXiv 2405.10928), listed under Apollo Research alongside Lucius Bushnaq and Stefan Heimersheim - shows the shift from physics into mechanistic interpretability.May 17, 2024
• Credited as an independent contributor on 'Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability' (arXiv 2501.16496), placing him in the same research network as Apollo Research, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and METR authors - a marker of standing in the interpretability community.Jan 27, 2025
• Represented Germany at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2013 (rank 250, 15 points) and 2015 (rank 160, 17 points), winning a bronze medal both times.Jul 2015
• Doctoral and masters research at Forschungszentrum Jülich (2021-2023) came after a Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik Hospitanz in 2014, giving a math-physics-interpretability trajectory rather than a single-field career.2023
• Won the Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik (German national mathematics competition) four times by age 19; local press framed him as an Augsburg native raised in Kaufering who was already competing internationally while still at school.Mar 31, 2016
• Active on LessWrong (user joern-stoehler) and X (@JStoehler), posting on alignment, interpretability and AI forecasting - his public voice is alignment-research commentary, not physics.2025
• GitHub account JoernStoehler holds math/alignment projects including msc-math-viterbo and ai-forecasting-hackathon, consistent with an independent researcher who codes his own experiments rather than working only inside a lab.2025
• Trained with the Bavarian olympiad squad (QED-Verein / MO training seminars) as a teenager, the pipeline that fed him into the IMO team - his competition record therefore predates and financed his later academic route rather than the reverse.Jul 7, 2017