Communiqué de presse – 10 septembre 2019

L’Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques apprend avec inquiétude les réformes du mécénat d’entreprise envisagées par le gouvernement. L’Institut pourrait particulièrement en souffrir.

Depuis plus de 60 ans, l’IHES relève le défi d’un financement vertueux, alliant soutiens publics et privés pour le bénéfice d’un secteur d’excellence de la France, la recherche fondamentale. Ce sont les industriels français qui ont appuyé le fondateur pour financer son modèle unique d’un centre de recherche fondamentale indépendant, qui a pu recruter et incuber depuis 1958 notamment sept médailles Fields, deux médailles d’or du CNRS, deux prix Abel, et qui attire chaque année plus de 200 chercheurs du monde entier.

Institut de recherche privé, bénéficiant du statut de fondation reconnue d’utilité publique, l’IHES s’est appuyé sur le mécénat pour compenser la disparition du soutien d’agences internationales de la recherche, et assurer sa pérennité en créant des fonds propres. Ces derniers financent aujourd’hui près de 20 % du budget de l’Institut ; sans les donateurs, et en particulier les entreprises françaises, cela n’aurait tout simplement pas été possible.

Avec la réforme envisagée, le taux de défiscalisation pour les entreprises donnant plus de deux millions à des associations et des fondations passerait de 60 % à 40 %. Or, les entreprises représentent plus de 90 % des dons reçus en France par l’IHES. Comme les principaux acteurs de la philanthropie, l’Institut s’inquiète de l’impact des réformes et craint une baisse significative des montants de dons.

L’IHES rappelle que la fiscalité n’est jamais l’argument principal dans les discussions avec les mécènes. En revanche, les dispositions fiscales incitent les entreprises à augmenter leurs dons et à les pérenniser. Par ailleurs, les entreprises pourraient être tentées de concentrer leur soutien vers une recherche plus appliquée, aux résultats immédiats.

Le mécénat d’entreprise est non seulement une source indispensable de soutien, mais il créé également des opportunités de rencontres entre communautés scientifiques. Des échanges fructueux qui sont indispensables à l’écosystème de recherche et d’innovation français.

Le président Macron s’est engagé à soutenir le secteur stratégique de la recherche. Il serait cohérent de maintenir le cadre fiscal de la générosité des entreprises, et l’IHES appelle les mécènes et acteurs du secteur de la philanthropie à se mobiliser dans ce sens.

A Professor of Mathematics at Yale University since 2010, Alexander Goncharov is the first holder of the Gretchen and Barry Mazur chair. He is interested in different fields of mathematics and mathematical physics, such as the theory of motives, Hodge theory, representation theory, higher Teichmüller theory and its quantification.

How did your interest in mathematics start?

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by astronomy and nuclear physics. At the time, even in my small town in Ukraine, one could find some great popular science books on these subjects. For example, I remember a book titled Entertaining Nuclear Physics, by Mukhin, explaining the subject in a serious, yet entertaining way. I read it many times, as I had done with The Three Musketeers.
A little later, my interests shifted to mathematics: I enjoyed solving problems and reading the Kvant magazine (a popular science magazine in physics and mathematics).
In 1976 I was admitted to Moscow University. The first Monday in September I attended Israel Gelfand’s seminar, which became the place where I grew up mathematically. I learned a great deal from D. Fuchs, J. Bernstein, S. Gindikin, Y. Manin and A. Beilinson. Moscow was a fantastic place to learn mathematics. But, for a young mathematician, it was not easy to survive the inevitable collision with officialdom. I was helped by Israel Gelfand and Simon Gindikin.

What are your research interests?

In mathematics, I like being at the cross-roads between different fields. Since the mid 1980s I have been studying integrals of algebraic geometric origin using methods of arithmetic geometry, often conjectural. This allows predictions to be made on the integrals without calculating them – I call this “arithmetic analysis.” Studying such integrals is an old enterprise, which significantly motivated the development of algebraic geometry. Entirely new insights brought Grothendieck’s idea of motives and, even more importantly, Beilinson’s conjectures on mixed motives. Using these ideas as guiding principles, one can predict values of integrals by performing easy algebraic calculations, and that is at the very heart of what I do: I use integrals to get further insights into the theory of motives and I apply the motivic philosophy to the study of integrals.
How has your relationship with the Institute evolved over the years?
I visited IHES for the first time in June 1990, just after the USSR opened its borders. Since then, my main motivation to come to IHES has been Maxim Kontsevich – we met almost forty years ago, and have been discussing mathematics ever since.
Yet, at IHES one gets the chance to meet many new people, which makes life delightfully unpredictable. For example, in 1996 I met Dirk Kreimer, and learned about amazing computations he and David Broadhurst were doing in quantum field theory. I suggested that one should apply techniques of arithmetic analysis in perturbative calculations of Feynman integrals. In particular one should upgrade correlation functions to their motivic avatars – motivic correlation functions – which lie in the motivic Galois Hopf algebra. That led to new insights and raised new type of questions.
The many contacts with physicists I have had since then can be traced back to these discussions at IHES.
Since January 2019, I am the first holder of the Gretchen and Barry Mazur Chair at IHES and that is a great honor for me. I am delighted to be here and especially grateful for the chance to give a series of lectures at IHES.

What do you find most exciting in what you do?

I get excited when sensing a mystery in mathematics. For example, the motivic symmetries show up only a posteriori. Yet in the real Hodge realisation one can make them visible by writing a single Feynman integral. It seems therefore that mathematical ideas underlying the quantum field theory paradigm will play an essential role in our description of the motivic world.

2018 Annual Report

A word from the Chairman

What can I do for IHES? This is the question I have been asking myself since Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, then Director of IHES, presented me with his project: to create equity capital, based on the model of the most prestigious American universities, in order to guarantee the Institute’s independence. In 2005, with Philippe Camus, we were able to convince Airbus, EADS at the time, to support the first IHES campaign. A few years later, in 2008, I joined the Institute’s Board of Directors and accompanied the second fundraising campaign. In 2014, I agreed to chair the Board of Directors, with the objective of continuing this conquest of independence.

Together, with Emmanuel Ullmo, but also the permanent professors and administrators, we wanted to involve the Institute in a third fundraising campaign, officially launched this year as the IHES celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Its name, “IHES, at the avant-garde of science” sets the tone and the objective of this campaign is indeed ambitious: to raise € 50m, including 30m from private sources. Our strategy focuses on people, place and sustainability, and these three axes are reflected in projects that are detailed in this annual report.

Investing in IHES means supporting the greatest mathematicians and physicists by giving them the means to pursue their research in total freedom. It also means providing the conditions for new knowledge to emerge. I am convinced that by supporting high-level fundamental research, we will open up potential for applied research and promote technological transformations.

Today, I found what I wanted to do for the Institute, and as part of the third fundraising campaign, “IHES, at the avantgarde of science”, my wife and I decided to make a donation to IHES’ endowment. We are convinced that the IHES’ mission must be sustained, and we are proud that our names are now associated with the Institute’s excellence.

I would like to thank all those who have already given their support to IHES as part of the campaign and invite you to join the forefront of science. You too, as an individual, company, foundation or institution, can help the IHES to succeed in this new phase.

 

Marwan Lahoud
Chairman of IHES

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.

On May 23rd, Alain ASPECT (Institut d’Optique and Ecole Polytechnique) gave a talk titled:

«The photon, wave or particle? Quantum weirdness brought to light».,

discussing the counterintuitive wave-particle duality of light.

The conference was followed by a musical interlude.

Bella Schütz (piano) performed pieces by J.S. Bach, F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, M. Ravel, A. Scriabin and L. van Beethoven.

Contact: Ingrid Peeters (01 60 92 66 64)

Download the poster

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.

Press release – 1 February 2019

A mathematician very close to the IHES, which he has been visiting regularly for more than 25 years, Prof. Penner wanted to pay tribute to his partner who died in January 2018. “I am a great believer in the Institute’s mission and am pleased to have associated our names to the IHES,” said Robert Penner. “Even with her only brief glimpse of it, Lexy was dazzled that there could be such a place as the IHES and would be gratified with this association.”

The gift will endow a triennial chair of Mathematics at the Institute that will provide support for prominent scientists. Chair holders are a specific type of invitations of IHES large visitors program: they are nominated by the Scientific Council, and come to the IHES for at least three months each year over three consecutive years, benefiting from the outstanding research and living conditions offered at the Institute.

“We are very grateful to Bob for his generous donation. It enables the IHES to fulfill its mission to offer exceptional scientists a place where their research can flourish,” said Michael R. Douglas, Chairman and President of the Friends of IHES, Inc.

“This generous gift from Bob is also an important contribution to our ongoing fundraising campaign, and I express my deepest gratitude for his support” said Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of the IHES. “Having scientists supporting our campaign is very meaningful and encourages us to pursue our efforts to defend the importance of unconstrained research.”

The first chair holder of the Alexzandria Figueroa and Robert Penner Chair will be Prof. Joseph Ayoub from the University of Zurich. A specialist of Algebraic Geometry, which has a long tradition at the IHES, Ayoub will benefit from all aspects of the academic and community life, that are unique elements of being at the Institute, and will contribute to the scientific dynamism of the IHES.

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.

The association “Les Amis de l’IHES” will organise a conference on Thursday 4 April 2019 at 5pm, in the Marilyn and James Simons Conference Centre.

Antoine TRILLER  (IBENS, ENS Ulm) will give a talk entitled:

“Communication between neurons: molecular instability
and memory, from normal to pathological.”

The neurons communicating with each other form networks that are at the origin of the properties of the nervous system. Neurons communicate with each other
between them at junctions called “synapses”. The components of
molecular synapses are unstable and move all the time diffusion processes, which are at the origin of a paradox that we will address: how to ensure stable memory when all the molecules move? We will then discuss the consequences of alterations of these movements in neurodegenerative pathologies, such as Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease.

The conference will be followed by a musical interlude. Guillaume Lachaussée (piano) et Caroline Apra (soprano) will perform works by  F. Schubert, R. Schumann, G. Fauré, and F. Poulenc.

Contact: Ingrid Peeters (01 60 92 66 64)

Free admission on registration: amisihes@ihes.fr

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Jean Bourgain, IBM von Neumann Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study died last December 22^nd.

Born in 1954 in Ostende, Belgium, Jean Bourgain obtained hi PhD (1977) and his habilitation degree (1979) from the Free University of Brussels, where he was a professor between 1981 and 1985. In 1985 he was appointed a permanent professorship at IHES, where he remained until 1994, when he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study.

His work covers a wide range of topics, particularly analysis and its applications to other fields of Mathematics. He managed to obtain important results and answer longstanding questions including refined properties of Fourier series and transform, existence of Gibbs measure on the torus for partial differential equations, global existence in time for critical equation, contributions on the Anderson localisation and existence of quasiperiodic solutions.

All along his career, his achievements have been recognized with numerous awards and honors acknowledging his exceptional capacity to delve into a large diversity of problems. Notably, he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 “for his contributions to geometry of Banach spaces, convexity in high-dimensional spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and the theory of nonlinear evolution equations”. He also received the Salem Price (1983), the Langevin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences (1985), the Damry-Deleeuw-Bourlart Price (1985), the Elie Cartan Prize of the Académie des Sciences (1990), the Ostrowski Prize (1991), the Shaw Prize (2010) and the Crafoord Prize (2012, together with Terence Tao).

Most recently, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2017 and the Steel prize of the American Mathematical Society in 2018 with the following citation: “Jean Bourgain is a giant in the field of mathematical analysis, which he has applied broadly and to great effect. In many instances, he provided foundations for entirely new areas of study, and in other instances he gave mathematics new tools and techniques.”.

He last visited IHES in 2014, when he contributed to the summer school on Analytic Number Theory.

At IHES we are deeply saddened by his death and extend our condolences to his family and friends.

The Institute’s third fundraising campaign, “IHES, at the avant-garde of science” was launched by Emmanuel Ullmo on 16 November 2018, during a ceremony presided over by Frédérique Vidal, the French Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, on the occasion of IHES’ 60th anniversary. This new and ambitious fundraising project focuses on three key elements: “People, Place, Perpetuity”.

“People“, first of all, because, as it was emphasised by the Institute’s Director during his speech, people are at the heart of the IHES project. Concerning permanent professors, the objective is to go from 5 to 7 posts, a number that has not been achieved at the Institute since the 1970s.

Another flagship project of this campaign is the creation of junior positions, in order to provide young talents with an optimal working environment. Developing post-doctoral opportunities remains a priority. Finally, IHES wishes to continue offering associate and visiting professors optimal research conditions.

“Place” because IHES must maintain the high standard of its hosting facilities. Increasing the number of workspaces to match the increase in scientific activity is a vital necessity. The maintenance and development of the Ormaille residence is equally crucial, as the ability to provide accommodation to researchers from around the world is a key asset.

Finally, “Perpetuity” because enabling IHES to move closer to independence by increasing its endowed capital remains a key priority andwill ensurethat the Institute can continue to operate far into the future.

In order to meet the objectives of the “IHES, at the avant-garde of science” project, the Institute must raise €50 million: €30 million from the private sector, €20 million from public institutions (excluding the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation). The silent phase of the campaign, which began in May 2015, raised almost half this sum, including more than €14 million in donations from companies, individuals and foundations. In her speech, Frédérique Vidal highlighted the Institute’s remarkable success in bringing philanthropists together to support its mission over the past 20 years. “The primary reason for IHES having convinced socio-economic players to believe in it and invest in it is the fact that a passion for mathematics does not only concern scientists. Mathematics has that “strange beauty” of which David Ruelle speaks, which fascinates and charms”, she recalled.

The official launch of the third campaign, “IHES, at the avant-garde of science”, ended with the inauguration of a new building completely dedicated to research, with twelve offices and collaborative workspaces. The Institute has chosen to name the new building after Alix and Marwan Lahoud, to mark the close relationship between IHES and its Chairman, and to thank the Lahouds for their extraordinary generosity. “With their donation, Alix and Marwan Lahoud became the Institute’s biggest individual donors in France. I am convinced that their commitment will inspire our donor community,” said Philippe Camus, who co-chairs the fundraising campaign with Jean-Laurent Bonnafé.

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.