Gérard Ben Arous is particularly interested in the connections between probability and statistical physics, statistics, data science, industrial applications as well as other domains of mathematics, mainly analysis and differential geometry.

Gérard Ben Arous studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and received his master’s degree and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris 7, under the supervision of Robert Azencott. After several positions at the École normale supérieure, at the Orsay University and at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (where he founded the Bernoulli Center), he joined the Courant Institute in New York in 2002. He has been its director from 2011 to 2016. He then helped build the Sciences at NYU-Shanghai, before coming back to Courant Institute in New York as a Silver Professor of Mathematics in 2020.

Today, Gérard Ben Arous’ research focuses mainly on the time evolution of complex systems, and the universal aspects of their long-time behavior and of their slow relaxation to equilibrium, in particular how complexity and disorder imply aging.

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Yves Barral is particularly interested in the idea that mathematics is relevant to biology especially when it is first interesting in itself and when it overhangs physics.

Yves Barral studies the similarities between the genomic structure of hereditary material and the logic of axiomatic theories, with a particular interest in the importance of the logical incompleteness of genetic systems in their interactions with the environment.

The experimental work of his laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich) focuses on the ability of cells to collect, process, and memorize information allowing them to individualize, explore and adapt to their environment. These studies use yeast as a simplified model system. They explore the molecular mechanisms used by eukaryotic cells to store memory and the links between this storage and the aging of the cell and the organism. In addition, this work has also highlighted the mechanisms by which cells actively “forget” certain information and how these mechanisms contribute to cellular rejuvenation.

Clément Mouhot was previously a researcher at the CNRS and worked at the University of Paris-Dauphine and at the ENS. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2004 under the supervision of Cédric Villani. His thesis topic was the Boltzmann equation.

Recently, Clément Mouhot works on De Giorgi-Nash methods on the one hand and geometric control for kinetic equations on the other hand, as well as on the hydrodynamic limit for stochastic particle systems on networks.

His collaboration with Sergiu Klainerman and Igor Rodnianski led to the solution of the L2 curvature conjecture in general relativity. 

His recent results are about:

• the resolution of the Kerr black hole stability conjecture in the special case of weakly rotating black holes, which he did in collaboration with Sergiu Klainerman, and in part with Elena Giorgi and Dawei Shen;
• the description of explosive regimes for the nonlinear supercritical focusing Schrödinger equation and for compressible fluids, done in collaboration with Frank Merle, Pierre Raphaël, and Igor Rodnianski.

After graduating from École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, Thierry Bodineau completed his PhD in 1997 at Université Paris Diderot (now Université Paris-Cité), under the supervision of Francis Comets, before becoming a CNRS researcher at the same university. In 2007, he joined ENS as a CNRS research director. Between 2008 and 2009, he spent a year in the United States, at Rutgers, New Jersey, and then at the Institute for Advanced Study.

It is upon his return from the United States that he began a very fruitful collaboration with Laure Saint-Raymond, now a permanent professor at IHES, who was then head of the mathematical analysis research team at ENS, and with whom he continues to work today.

In 2014, Thierry Bodineau joined the Center for Applied Mathematics (CMAP) at École Polytechnique. He served as deputy director of École doctorale Jacques Hadamard before becoming the director of CMAP in 2020, following Anne de Bouard.

Thierry Bodineau is a mathematician specializing in probability theory, and his work focuses on problems related to statistical mechanics. He was first interested in the study of the Ising model, the coexistence of phases and the interface problems that characterize these systems. He also worked on understanding non-equilibrium phenomena through stochastic modeling. More recently, he has become interested in renormalization aspects related to the study of the dynamics of particle systems and is working on the kinetic theory of gases, also in collaboration with Laure Saint-Raymond.

His relationship with the Institute dates back to the time when, as a student at ENS, he heard about it as a mythical place. But it is especially in the 2000’s that he started to regularly come to the Institute motivated by his collaboration with Joel Lebowitz, an American mathematical physicist known for his important contributions in the field of statistical physics, who was then already a frequent visitor to IHES. Thierry Bodineau then continued to attend courses and seminars organized at the Institute.

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After graduating from École Polytechnique, Pierre Raphael receives his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Cergy-Pontoise. He joins the CNRS in 2004 and then moves to Princeton as an Assistant Professor.

He returns to France as Professor in Toulouse and Nice and becomes the principal investigator of several European grants.

He finally joins Cambridge’s Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in 2019.

Léon Motchane was convinced, firstly that fundamental research should be supported by large industrial companies, secondly that researchers should have thorough freedom of choice. He, therefore, decided to set up an institute in France, similar to the Institute to Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, to bring together high-level mathematicians et physicists

With Robert Oppenheimer’s support, then Director of the IAS, as well as that of large private companies, Léon Motchane created the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in 1958, which moved to Bois-Marie in 1962.

The Institute’s reputation gradually became international thanks to the various scientific personalities who came to visit, but also thanks to the Publications mathématiques de l’IHES or the famous « Séminaire de géométrie algébrique » by Grothendieck, which were at the core of the reorganization of algebraic geometry in the 60s.

Upon Léon Motchane’s retirement in 1971, Nicolaas H. Kuiper took over as Director.

Laure Saint-Raymond entered the École normale supérieure in 1994. During her studies, she obtained a DEA in numerical analysis at the University of Paris VI and another in plasma physics at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, as well as an agrégation in mathematics. She then obtained a doctorate at the department of mathematics and applications of the ENS under the supervision of mathematician François Golse, on the kinetic theory of gases. She was recruited as a research fellow at the CNRS in 2000. She was then appointed professor at the Université Paris VI in 2002. In 2007, she was seconded to the École normale supérieure, where she headed the analysis team before becoming director of studies in the mathematics department. She was elected a member of the Académie des sciences since 2013, when she has since been a regular participant in think tanks, notably on the dissemination of knowledge. She became a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2015, after spending a sabbatical year in the United States, at the joint invitation of Harvard University and MIT. In 2016, she joined the École normale supérieure de Lyon as a university professor with the project of developing strong links between mathematics and physics.

Laure Saint-Raymond works mainly on the asymptotic analysis of systems of partial differential equations, in particular those governing gas, plasma, and fluid dynamics. In particular, she has made fundamental contributions to Hilbert’s sixth problem concerning the axiomatization of mechanics, one of the 23 problems proposed by David Hilbert at the International Mathematical Congress of 1900, which has not been solved to this day. With various collaborators, she has shown that there is a continuous transition between non-equilibrium statistical physics models and the equations of fluid mechanics, and more recently she has studied the validity of these statistical models based on Newtonian mechanics. In parallel, she works on fluid mechanics models describing ocean currents, including the influence of rotation and stratification on wave propagation and boundary layer phenomena.

Anton Kapustin has made several important contributions to dualities and other aspects of quantum field theories. With Edward Witten, he discovered deep connections between the S-duality of supersymmetric gauge theories and the geometric Langlands correspondence.

In recent years, Anton Kapustin has focused on mathematical structures and classification schemes of topological theories and symmetrically protected fields and topological phases.

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He is a member of the Institut de Physique Théorique of CEA and of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques of Montréal.

Specialist in random matric theory, a subject he teaches at the “Probabilities” Master’s program at Paris-Saclay University, as well as in postgraduate-schools, Bertrand Eynard has led many projects on map enumeration and authored a book, “Counting Surfaces”, Birkhäuser (2017). One of his achievements in 2019 was to establish an upper bound (Gevrey index) on the growth of topological recursion coefficients, thus opening the route towards the resurgence formalism.

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Dennis Gaitsgory studied at Tel Aviv University under Joseph Bernstein (1990-1996) and received his doctorate in 1997. Prior to his 2021 appointment at Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics, Bonn, he was an associate professor at the University of Chicago from 2001–2005 and a professor at Harvard University from 2005-2021.

His work in geometric Langlands culminated in a joint 2002 paper with Edward Frenkel and Kari Vilonen, which established the conjecture for finite fields. In 2004, Dennis Gaitsgory published a separate paper, generalizing the proof to include the field of complex numbers as well.

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