Jean-Marc Fontaine died aged 74

Mathematician Jean-Marc Fontaine died on 29 January 2019 aged 74.

His contribution to the development of arithmetic geometry and more particularly to the understanding of Galois representations is invaluable and has been extremely influential in this field, both in France and internationally.

Jean-Marc Fontaine was an Emiritus Professor at universié Paris-Sud, after having been a professor there from 1988 to 2009. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences since 2002 (correspondent since 1986), of the Academia Europaea since 2014, and was a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France from 1994 to 2004. He was invited twice to the International Congress of Mathematics (Warsaw in 1983 and Beijing in 2002) and received the Career Award of the Academy of Sciences in 1984 and the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2002.

Throughout his career, Jean-Marc Fontaine had a strong relationship with IHES. His seminar “Périodes p-adiques” (Séminaire de Bures, 1988), which took place at IHES and was published in “Asterisque”, vol. 223, is one of the essential references for p-adic Hodge theory.

His profound vision of mathematics inspired his many students and collaborators. IHES joins the tributes paid by his colleagues and collaborators at the Institute and at université Paris-Sud in announcing his death, and extends its most sincere condolences to his family.