The 2019 Friends of IHES gala will be held on November 5 at the Harvard Club of New York City and it promises to be a memorable evening!

The theme of this edition will be Game Theory: the Science of Strategy. Based in mathematics, Game Theory helps us understand the strategic reasoning at play in competition, and gives us the tools and language to analyze different paths and examine multiple solutions.

Honored guest speaker Constantinos Daskalakis, professor at MIT and the recipient of the 2018 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, among many other awards, will guide us through the intricacies of this topic.

Sylvia Nasar will serve as Master of Ceremonies. She is the author of A Beautiful Mind the now-classic biography of mathematician and Nobel laureate John Nash that inspired the Academy-Award winning movie and became a global bestseller. Additionally, she was an economics correspondent at the New York Times and is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor Emerita at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of Friends of IHES, and  this gala will be an occasion to celebrate this milestone together. Game Theory: the Science of Strategy promises to be an exceptional evening of entertainment and learning with friends, old and new.

Friends of IHES and IHES are profoundly grateful to the gala main benefactors, for their generous support of the Institute’s mission. In particular, premier sponsor BNP Paribas and Gala Chairs Florence & David Faucon and Barbara Amonson & Vincent Della Pietra.

Please reserve your seat today.

Each year in the Spring and for a selection in June, IHES is calling for proposals for future Summer Schools to be held over two weeks. Their theme may relate to any topic in mathematics or theoretical physics.

Held yearly in July, these Summer Schools are designed to provide a hundred young researchers with an overview of recent developments in key subjects of mathematics and theoretical physics.

To learn more about this call for proposals and to submit your projects, visit the call for proposals webpage.

Alain Valette, born on 24 December 1958, obtained his thesis in December 1983, entitled “K-theory for certain C*-algebras associated with Lie groups” under the co-directorship of Lucien Waelbroeck and Alain Connes. He has been a professor at the University of Neuchâtel since June 1988. His mathematical contributions are numerous and have a very broad spectrum, including operator algebras, graph theory and group geometry. The books he has written with several co-authors, for example on the Kazhdan property (T), the expansion graphs or the Baum-Connes conjecture, are works of reference that have been crucial in the modern development of these subjects.

The conference, organized by Indira Chatterji (Univ. Nice Sophia-Antipolis), Yves de Cornulier (Univ. Lyon 1), Soyoung Moon (Univ. de Bourgogne, Dijon), Yves Stalder (Univ. Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand) and Romain Tessera (Univ. Paris-Sud 11), will be held at IHES on 17 and 18 December 2018. The list of speakers includes: Goulnara ARZHANTSEVA (University of Vienna), Bachir BEKKA (University of Rennes 1), Pierre-Emmanuel CAPRACE (Université catholique de Louvain), Alain CONNES (Collège de France & IHES), Ana KHUKHRO (University of Cambridge), Georges SKANDALIS (IMJ-PRG), Stefaan VAES (KU Leuven) and Karen VOGTMANN (University of Warwick).

Registration is free but compulsory

Programme

Poster

The last event of IHES 60th Anniversary program took place on November 16. Presided by the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Frédérique Vidal, the ceremony gathered many officials, scientists and supporters, who were there to express their commitment to the Institute.

In his speech, Emmanuel Ullmo honoured the visionary spirit of the founder, Léon Motchane, and the work of previous directors, Nicolaas Kuiper, Marcel Berger and Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. The Director presented his vision for the IHES and officially launched the Institute’s 3rd fundraising campaign. Live from his new-york Foundation, Jim Simons, Board Director of the IHES, reiterated his trust and support for the Institute’s scientific development. Marwan Lahoud, Chairman of the IHES Board of Directors, then thanked the Institute’s partners and expressed his satisfaction at contributing to the new campaign with his wife. Finally, the Minister praised the excellence of the IHES, emphasizing its ability to take risks: “The IHES does not recruit Fields medals,” she recalled, “it incubates them.”

Frédérique Vidal then inaugurated the Alix and Marwan Lahoud building. Launched in 2018, the construction of an annex to the science building had become necessary to handle the increasing activity, and to host in particular post-doctoral fellows. The Institute has chosen to name the new building “Alix and Marwan Lahoud” to express the deep bond between the IHES and its Chairman and to thank the Lahouds for their extraordinary generosity. The visit to this new research facility revealed the Grothendieck statue made by the artist Nina Douglas and donated by the Simons to the IHES.

“Savant Mélange, an event celebrating scientific research”, was held on October 16 at the Grand amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne.

As part of the celebrations for its 60th anniversary, IHES organized a free and open event, an opportunity for great scientists and science enthusiasts to share their enthusiasm for research with a wide audience.

Nearly 800 people attended the event hosted by Mathieu Vidard, decipherer of the most complex sciences, and which brought together such passionate and visionary personalities as Cédric Villani, mathematician and MP, Thibault Damour, physicist specialised in gravitational waves, Claire Voisin, mathematician and professor at Collège de France and Bruce Benamran, a youtuber whose vocation in to make complex scientific concepts understandable by the widest audience. Through a series of short and varied interventions, they shared their discoveries, their backgrounds and their passion for scientific research.

Throughout the evening, the public was able to propose questions on social networks, that Mathieu Vidard asked the speakers on stage. This gave Cédric Villani the opportunity to give us his point of view on whether one can be a self-taught mathematician and Claire Voisin was able to give her advice to young scientists to “start very broad and very ambitious” and explain to us why she chose algebraic geometry as a research subject.

Noting the presence of young people in the audience, Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of IHES, commented: “So many students willing to come here to hear us talk about science, it’s encouraging! ». Indeed, nearly 300 students from the academies of Versailles, Paris, Orléans were present, as well as a group of high school students who are members of the “Science Ouverte” association.

The evening was broadcast live and is now available in its entirety on our Youtube channel, but you can also watch the speeches separately.

Find all the best tweets from Savant Mélange.

IHES sincerely thanks BNP Paribas, UNESCO and the Mairie de Paris, who made this event possible.

 

Partners:

On Monday 22th January, 2018, IHES will host the 8th Itzykson Seminar, titled “Parafermionic observables and 2D statistical physics”.

The program includes three lectures. The morning will be dedicated to an introduction to the topic of parafermionic variables given by Hugo Duminil-Copin (IHES). In the afternoon Denis Bernard (ENS Paris) will present an introduction to different parafermionic variables and fields in statistical physics. Dmitry Chelkak (ENS Paris & PDMI, St. Petersburg) will apply these concepts to the 2D Ising model.

The detailed program of the conference is available here.
Watch the videos on our youtube channel.

Since 2012 the Itzykson seminars have been organized by Nicolas Curien, Thibault Damour, Maxim Kontsevich, Kirone Mallick, Stéphane Nonnenmacher and Pierre Vanhove within the context of the Labex Mathématiques Hadamard (LMH).

Participation is free but registration is compulsory. A buffet lunch will be offered and young researchers can ask LMH for their travel expenses to be reimbursed.

For more information: Itzykson Seminar – LMH

On December 6 – 9, IHES will host the conference “Riemannian Geometry: Past, Present and Future: an homage to Marcel Berger”.

Organised by Pierre Bérard (Université Grenoble Alpes), Gérard Besson (CNRS & Université Grenoble Alpes) and Pierre Pansu (Université Paris-Sud), three of his former students, the conference will constitute a special tribute to Marcel Berger, a differential geometer and the IHES director between 1985 and 1993.

Marcel Berger’s contributions to mathematics are important and diverse. His thesis permitted the classification of holonomy groups of Riemannian, non-locally symmetric manifolds, that had an important impact during the 1990s on theoretical physics. He is also to be credited for the ¼ pinching sphere theorem.

But his contributions to mathematics go far beyond his research results: he also inspired the several young mathematicians who had the chance to be among his students and, through his books, he helped clarify some key concepts in differential geometry. The seminars on Riemannian geometry that he organized during the 1970s and 1980s at Paris VII were an important occasion for informal exchanges between more experienced and young researchers. He had a fundamental influence on the round tables organized by his friend Arthur L. Besse

Taking place over four days, the conference will gather some of the most important personalities in Riemannian geometry and it will also be an occasion to define its current state of the art and to think of its possible future developments.

Registration is free but compulsory.

Click here for more information.

The workshop “Quantum Gravity: Physics and Philosophy” aims at bringing together the physicists that during the last decades have been working on a possible way to build a quantum theory of gravity, and philosophers interested in the conceptual issues that such effort inevitably encounters along the way.

Philosophy of quantum gravity is a recently emerging field of research. An ERC project titled Philosophy of Canonical Quantum Gravity, directed by Gabriel Catren (Université Paris-Diderot), tries to tackle the problem of quantum gravity from a philosophical perspective.

The conference will take place at IHES on 24^th – 27^th October and it is organized by Gabriel Catren (CNRS, Laboratoire SPHERE), Thibault Damour (IHES), Elie During (Université Paris Nanterre, Laboratoire IRePh), and Federico Zalamea (CNRS, Laboratoire SPHERE). The list of speakers includes some outstanding researchers in the field and their talks will develop around a wide spectrum of themes: the principles of quantum gravity, black holes, holographic correspondences, quantum cosmology, emergence of spacetime, the status of time in quantum gravity and quantum geometries.

This workshop also aims to provide students and young researchers with an overview of the major conceptual issues of this vast field of research.

Registration is free but mandatory.

For more information: https://philo-phys-qg.sciencesconf.org/.

IHES, the FMJH (Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard), the FSMP (Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris), and the IPhT (Institut de Physique Théorique) will welcome their new post-docs on October 19th, through a full day of seminars and discussions. All post-docs in mathematics and theoretical physics working in the Paris region are warmly invited to participate and everybody is welcome!

The morning, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., will be dedicated to post-docs in mathematics.
E. Di Nezza (IHES), C. Llosa Isenrich (Université Paris-Sud), C. Marzouk (Université Paris-Sud), J. Lin (IHES), and D. Kazerani (UPMC), will present their work, thus providing a panoramic view of the research carried out in the region. Long coffee breaks and an on-site lunch are aimed at encouraging discussions. This will also be an occasion for the participants to suggest possible  conferences and workshops that could complement the current schedule of activities involving the community of young mathematicians in the region.
This part of the day is co-organised by IHES, the FSMP and the FMJH.

The afternoon will be dedicated to the interaction between young mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and it is co-organised by IHES, the FMJH and IPhT.
The five afternoon speakers are F. Antenucci (IPhT), R. Frassek (IHES), M. Lewandowski (IPhT), R. Monten (IPhT), and P. Zhou (IHES). A small closing reception will follow, where the participants will have the possibility to meet and discuss with the IHES permanent professors.

Registration in compulsory for either or both the morning and the afternoon events.

More information.

The Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard (FMJH) organises three days of seminars, mini-courses and informal discussions, to mark the beginning of a new academic year for master’s students.

On Sept. 6-8 the master’s students of the Paris-Saclay University will gather at IHES to discuss, meet each other, and get an idea of some of the problems that mathematicians deal with on the Paris-Saclay campus.

The adhering institutions are: the Paris-Sud University, École polytechnique, the Versailles St. Quentin University, the ENS Paris-Saclay, the Evry-Val-d’Essonne University, the ENSTA and CentraleSupélec.

IHES is looking forward to welcoming the Paris-Saclay University master’s students during these three days, which look very promising!

The program, as well as the abstracts of the mini-courses and seminars, are available on the FMJH webpage.

Registration is compulsory.

The special properties of Black Holes have intrigued researchers for decades. They do signal their existence in nature in several ways including by emitting gravitational waves while merging. Their way of handling information is more elusive. In this workshop several aspects of this information handling will be discussed, with some emphasis on possible relations it has to the theory of chaos, thermalization and quantum information.

Invited speakers are : Barbon José (IFT-CSIC, Univ. Autonoma de Madrid), Bena Iosif (CEA Saclay), Craps Ben (Vrije Univ. Brussel), De Boer Jan  (Univ. of Amsterdam), Ferrari Frank (Univ. Libre de Bruxelles), Gibbons Gary  (DAMTP, Cambridge Univ.), Gurau Razvan (CPHT, Ecole polytechnique), Kurchan Jorge (ENS, Paris), Maldacena Juan (IAS, Princeton), Page Don N. (Univ. of Alberta, Canada), Papadodimas Kyriakos (CERN, Genève), Perry Malcolm (Cambridge Univ.), Rivasseau Vincent (Univ. Paris-Sud, Orsay), Rosenhaus Vladimir (UC Santa Barbara), Shepelyansky Dima  (Univ. Paul Sabatier, Toulouse), Solodukhin Sergey (Univ. de Tours), Veneziano Gabriele (CERN, Genève)

The conference will take place at IHES, it will start at 2pm on May 29th and it will end on June 1st.

It is organised by Thibault Damour (IHES), Vasily Pestun (IHES), Eliezer Rabinovici (IHES &  Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem).

Check the conference page for more information and click here to register.

Photo credit : CNRS Le journal

The aim of the conference, organised by Linxiao Chen, Sophie Laruelle, Pascal Maillard, Bastien Mallein, Damien Simon, with the collaboration of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, is to constitute an occasion for the probabilists of Île-de-France to gather around their respective topics of interest. There will be around ten presentations from PhD students and two talks from invited professors, that this year will be Dmitry Chelkak and Remco van der Hofstad.

This second edition will take place at IHES on Thursday May 11th. Participants will be welcome from 8.30 and talks will start at 9am.
Registration is free but compulsory and lunch will be offered to all participants.

Check the conference webpage for any additional information.

Sponsors : Labex Mathématiques Hadamard and École Doctorale Mathématiques Hadamard.