Wolfgang Lück (born 19 February 1957 in Herford) is a German mathematician who is an internationally recognized expert in Algebraic Topology.
After obtaining his Abitur from the Ravensberger Gymnasium in Herford in 1975 he studied at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen where he obtained his Diplom in 1981 and obtained his doctoral degree under Tammo tom Dieck. The title of his thesis was „Eine allgemeine Beschreibung für Faserungen auf projektiven Klassengruppen und Whiteheadgruppen“.
From 1982 on he was research assistant and from 1985 on he was assistant in Göttingen. In 1989 Lück got his Habilitation. In the year 1990/91 he was Associate Professor at the university of University of Kentucky in Lexington.
From 1991 until 1996 he was professor at the Universität Mainz, from 1996 until 2010 he has been teaching at the Universität Münster, since 2010 he works at Universität Bonn. In 2003 he was awarded the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis and in 2008 the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Lück has been working in the theory of L2-invariants (such as L2-Betti numbers and L2-cohomology) of manifolds in algebraic topology, which were originally introduced by Michael Atiyah and are defined by means of operator algebras. They have applications in group theory and geometry.
Since the beginning of 2009 Lück has been president of the Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, whose vice president he had been since 2006.
Since October 2011 Lück is Director of HIM (Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics, Bonn).