On June 9, 2022, the International Science Council (ISC) announced the establishment of a Fellowship that will initially be given to 51 of the world’s leading scientists, in addition to the 15 members of its Governing Board.

This is intended to be the highest honour that the ISC can confer on a scientist. It is awarded to individuals who have distinguished themselves through their international scientific actions, their scientific leadership, their contributions to major scientific initiatives and structures, or by the scope of their scientific work.

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, mathematician, former director and now honorary professor of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), is one of the first Foundation Fellows of the ISC. He is one of two French scientists to receive this recognition, along with Cédric Villani, who is also a mathematician and a regular visitor at IHES.

The International Science Council (ISC) is the only international NGO bringing together over 200 international natural and social science unions and associations as well as national and regional scientific organizations including academies, research councils, institutes and foundations.

 

New event organized by Les Amis de l’IHES on Thursday June 23, 2022 at 5:00 pm (French Time) at IHES

Annie SAINSARD-CHANET gave a conference (in French) in hybrid format, entitled:

Molecular scissors: a biological revolution

“The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, has been awarded for the development of the CrispR-Cas9 or molecular scissors tool. With this tool, it is now possible to modify the genes of any type of cell, with an ease and precision previously unimaginable. The potential of CRISPR opens up unprecedented avenues for research in biology and in the medical field but poses ethical questions, particularly with regards to the manipulation of the genome of the human species.”
The conference was followed by a musical interlude with Christian Ivaldi and Sébastien Mongrand (four hand Piano).

Contact: Ingrid Peeters (01 60 92 66 64)

On Saturday, May 21, 2022, IHES opened its doors for a half-day visit to about sixty high school students, most of them girls, all passionate about mathematics and science, among the most promising and deserving from the Académie de Versailles.

Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of IHES presents the N. H. Kuiper Library to high schoolersThe morning began with a tour of the institute and its various buildings. The students were able to discover the Bois-Marie setting, a vast domain conducive to inspiring research work, as well as the N. H. Kuiper Library. They learned about the history of the Institute and its associated scientific figures.

The visit continued with a playful experience related to the Institute’s sculpture “Skolem, choc de blocs & chiffres au vent”: the students were able to play a life-size mathematical game, presented by Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, former Director of IHES, now an honorary Professor.

The second part of the morning took place at the Marilyn and James Simons Conference Center. After an introduction by Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of IHES, the high schoolers enjoyed the surprise visit of Cédric Villani, Fields Medalist in 2010, whose multi-faceted extraordinary career proves that mathematics can lead to multiple paths. A regular visitor at IHES, where he used to work, Cédric Villani feels that public outreach is particularly important in science and mathematics.

To conclude this morning, Blandine Galiay, winner of the Junior Maryam Mirzakhani 2021 prize from the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard, currently pursuing a Master’s degree at École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, gave a scientific talk and Mendes Oulamara, a PhD student from Université Paris-Saclay currently working at IHES, gave a short lecture on probability theory.

These two inspiring and interactive talks clearly peaked the high schoolers’ interest. Certainly, the whole visit should inspire several of them to further cultivate their passion for mathematics!

Press release – 12 May 2022

On the occasion of the International day for women in mathematics, IHES is glad to announce that Yiling Wang will join the Institute as a junior professor.

Yilin Wang will join the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) as a junior professor of mathematics in June 2022.

The young mathematician becomes the first holder of a prestigious position of junior professor at IHES, funded by the Simons Foundation and given to researchers at the beginning of their career, who have distinguished themselves by their remarkable talent in the discipline.

Born in 1991 in China, Yilin Wang moved to France for her graduate studies. After entering the École normale supérieure of Paris, she obtained a Master of Science in Probability and Statistics from Université Paris-Saclay. After graduating in 2019 with a PhD from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) of Zurich, under the supervision of Wendelin Werner (Fields Medal 2006), Yilin Wang obtained the position of C.L.E. Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She then became a Strauch Postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute of Berkeley (MSRI) in California.

Yilin Wang is currently working on topics at the interface of Complex analysis and Probability theory. Her current research focuses on themes that aim at enlightening the connections among Random conformal geometry, Geometric function theory, and Teichmüller theory.

In 2022, she received the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize for innovative and far-reaching work on the Loewner energy of planar curves. “I spend most of my time playing with Loewner energy, Schramm-Loewner evolutions, Gaussian free field, Weil-Petersson Teichmüller space, determinants of Laplacians, Brownian loop measure, hyperbolic spaces, etc” says Yilin Wang.

IHES Director Emmanuel Ullmo comments: “We are proud to welcome such a talented mathematician to this new junior faculty position, which we have just created at IHES. Her remarkable research on the probabilistic and analytic aspects of Loewner energy, for which she has already been awarded several prizes, testifies to the excellence of this young scientist’s work.”

The mathematician is also delighted with this opportunity: “Joining IHES will allow me to benefit from an extremely favorable professional environment, both to advance my current research work and to establish new collaborations. With this new position, I am convinced that I will have the best conditions to develop new approaches to a number of problems.”

This year IHES celebrated the International Day of Women in Mathematics through an event that took place on Tuesday, May 17, at 5:30pm, both at IHES and online.

On that occasion, Indira Chatterji, professor of mathematics at the University Côte d’Azur, gave a talk entitled Institutional bias, explained by a mathematician.

In statistics, a bias is the discrepancy between the theoretical value of a variable and the observed value. For example, it is widely accepted that men and women have the same intellectual capacity regarding mathematics, but we observe that there are very few female mathematicians. On neutral examples, we will study how biases can be created.

Photographer Marie-Hélène Le Ny introduced her project Infinités Plurielles, a series of portraits of women researchers.
A selection of pictures in the series provided by Université Paris-Saclay was exhibited at IHES during the event.

This event (that took place in English) was introduced by Bertille Follain, a PhD student in mathematics at Ecole normale supérieure de Paris, laureate of the 2021 Maryam Mirzakhani Junior Prize of the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard.

This event was organized in association with the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard (FMJH).

Watch the entire event here.

Laure Saint-Raymond, permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES), was elected on May 3 as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States, one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Laure Saint-Raymond’s work focuses mainly on the asymptotic analysis of systems of partial differential equations, in particular those governing the dynamics of gases, plasmas or fluids. In particular, she has made fundamental contributions to Hilbert’s sixth problem on the axiomatization of mechanics at the heart of which lies Boltzmann’s equation.

With François Golse, she has shown that there is a continuous transition between the models of non-equilibrium statistical physics and the equations of fluid mechanics, and more recently, with Thierry Bodineau, Isabelle Gallagher and Sergio Simonella, she has studied the validity of these statistical models based on Newtonian mechanics. She is working in parallel on models in fluid mechanics that describe ocean currents, including the effect of fluid rotation and stratification on wave propagation and boundary layer phenomena.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and – with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine – provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

 

• Watch the video, produced by Philip Yam for the Simons Foundation, which explains the essence of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work and its relation to Hilbert’s challenge, as well as to Laure Saint-Raymond’s work.

 
• Watch the conversation between Nathalie Ayi and Laure Saint-Raymond sharing their views on mathematics in preparation to the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians, where Laure Saint-Raymond will be a plenary speaker.

Mathematician Dennis Sullivan, Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and professor at Stony Brook University, has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize, “for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in the broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects”.

He was a permanent professor at IHES between 1974 and 1997 and until today he is the third former IHES permanent professor to have received this distinction, together with Pierre Deligne and Mikhail Gromov.

When he was recruited at IHES at the young age of thirty-three, Dennis Sullivan had already made himself known for his qualities as a geometer. The then director Nicolaas Kuiper, who recruited him in 1974, described him as “a world-famous mathematician, known especially for the highly original nature of his research on the topology of manifolds, algebraic topology, the topology of polynomial equations, singularities and dynamical systems.”, stressing that “his mindset demonstrates not only a strong mastery of technique, but also a willingness to tackle the most fundamental problems.”¹

On top of his important contributions to mathematics, during the many years that he spent at the Institute, managing time between France and the US, Dennis Sullivan played an essential role in gathering a lively community of mathematicians around him, that made his presence extremely cherished at the Institute.

IHES warmly congratulates him on this important award.

Learn more about the prize and Dennis Sullivan’s contributions.

 

¹ Reference: “A history of IHES”, 2020

In this video, Nathalie Ayi and Laure Saint-Raymond discuss their view of mathematics and of research as a collective effort, and stress the importance of communication in making science widely accessible.

Laure Saint-Raymond is a permanent professor at IHES, Laboratoire Alexander Grothendieck (CNRS/IHES), Nathalie Ayi is an assistant professor at Sorbonne Université, Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions (CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université de Paris).

This conversation was recorded in January 2022, in preparation to the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians, where Laure Saint-Raymond will be a plenary speaker.

On 17 February 2022, Claude P. Bruter gave an hybrid conference (in French) taking place both at IHES and on zoom, entitled:

« Arts and mathematics: on the embodiment of mathematical objects within visual art »

Some works of several personalities of the contemporary artistic and mathematical world will illustrate the recent and prodigious development of techniques and tools of representations of the immense universe of mathematical objects. The primary physical origin of the stratified world of mathematics will be highlighted. In parallel to the evolution in its construction of the building M building housing the mathematical objects, colorful and mostly unusual forms of objects borrowed from number theories, geometric theories, topological and fractal theories will appear.

The conference, accompanied by an exhibition of works from ESMA (European Society for Mathematics and the Arts) was followed by a musical interlude by Noémie Combe (violin) and Thibault Damour (Piano).

Contact : Ingrid Peeters

Link to the works presented at the institute

Download the poster

It is in the form of a set of 2 books of nearly 1000 pages each (in French) that Editions Gallimard has decided to publish the writings of Alexander Grothendieck known as Récoltes et semailles.

Alexander Grothendieck (also known as Alexandre Grothendieck) is considered as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, having revisited notably the very foundations of algebraic geometry. Recruited by Léon Motchane at the creation of IHES, he was a permanent professor from 1958 to 1970 and has deeply marked the history of the Institute. During this period, he wrote the Elements of Algebraic Geometry with Jean Dieudonné, also a permanent professor at that time, and he organized the “Séminaire de géométrie algébrique de Grothendieck” which still remains a unique reference today worldwide.

The Institute has supported Gallimard for this publication which has required a meticulous work of retranscription and layout. A 16-page special issue gives unprecedented perspectives on the work with texts, notably, by Olivia Caramello (holder of the Israël Gelfand Chair at IHES since 2020), Laurent Lafforgue (permanent professor at IHES from 2000 to 2021), and Emmanuel Ullmo (director of IHES).

An event to celebrate the publication of this set of books took place at the bookstore “Compagnie” (Paris) on February 4 at 7.00 pm with Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, former director of IHES, as one of the speakers.

Krzysztof Gawędzki, emeritus CNRS research director at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon, died on Friday, January 21, 2022, at the age of 74.

A physicist, he had obtained his PhD from the University of Warsaw, where he worked as a researcher until 1979. He was then invited to Harvard University, and arrived in France in 1981. He was a CNRS research director at IHES from 1984 to 2001, before joining the ENS in Lyon. During the 17 years he spent at the Institute, he played a leading role in promoting mathematical physics thanks to his broad knowledge in this domain. He also greatly contributed to the scientific activity of IHES by organizing a regular seminar on theoretical physics.

His contributions have been extremely diverse, on topics ranging from quantum field theory and conformal theories to turbulence and non-equilibrium physics.

During his time at IHES, his work greatly contributed to the rigorous understanding of renormalization group transformations in quantum field theory. His interests then moved to conformal field theory in two dimensions (in particular to the Wess-Zumino-Witten-Novikov models), and to Chern-Simons theory. He then focused on the study of turbulence by describing the anomalous behavior of the advection of a scalar field. More recently, Gawędzki made fundamental contributions to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.

In 2022, he shared with Antti Kupiainen the “Dannie Heineman” prize for mathematical physics from the American Physical Society “for fundamental contributions to quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and fluid dynamics using geometric, probabilistic, and renormalization group ideas.”

Professor Laure Saint Raymond joined IHES last September. Her work mainly focuses on the asymptotic analysis of partial differential equations, particularly those governing gas, plasma, and fluid dynamics. Notably, she made important contributions towards solving Hilbert’s sixth problem, at the heart of which lies Boltzmann’s equation.

This video, produced by Philip Yam for the Simons Foundation, explains the essence of Ludwig Boltzmann’s work and its relation to Hilbert’s challenge, as well as to Laure Saint-Raymond’s work.