Press release – 5 July 2023

Qube Research and Technologies (QRT) renews its support to the summer schools organized at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques with a donation of €150k to the Institute’s endowment fund.

QRT became a major donor to IHES in 2022, through an initial donation that contributed to the Institute’s endowment fund, to support the IHES Summer Schools. This year, QRT renewed and strengthened its support to IHES, and more particularly to its summer schools.

The IHES Summer Schools are important annual events dedicated to a different topic each year. They bring together scientists from all over the world, who come to the Institute to attend advanced courses given by experienced researchers.

By choosing to support these regular events that contribute to training scientists at the early stages of their careers, QRT continues its commitment to supporting fundamental research at the highest level, specifically in favor of young researchers. Through this donation, QRT is also strengthening its support to Université Paris-Saclay, of which IHES is a founding member.

A signing ceremony of the gift agreement between QRT and IHES took place on Tuesday July 4 at QRT’s London offices, where Thibault Damour, theoretical physicist and Professor Emeritus at IHES, gave a lecture on gravitational waves and black holes.

Emmanuel Ullmo, Director of the IHES, says: “I am delighted that QRT has chosen to renew its support for the IHES Summer Schools by making a new gift to the Institute’s endowment fund. It is very important for IHES to be able to count on the support of corporate sponsors that share our values of freedom and independence in research. The Institute is very grateful for QRT’s commitment to the younger generations of scientists.”

Pierre-Yves Morlat, CEO of Qube Research and Technologies, comments: “We are proud to support IHES and specifically its initiatives targeted at younger generations. QRT applies a scientific approach to investments and benefits from advances in fundamental sciences. We are delighted to contribute to the training of new talents in these fields through our support to the IHES Summer Schools.”

It is with great sadness that IHES learnt of Nuccio Ordine’s passing on Saturday June 10, 2023. Barely a month before he had spent six weeks at IHES as an invited researcher.

We publish a tribute written by physicist Ugo Moschella, professor at Università dell’Insubria, Italy, a regular visitor to IHES and a great friend of Nuccio Ordine’s.

Nuccio Ordine was a passionate man. He would not sit down with the aloof. He loved and sought beauty in everything and in every encounter.

He wouldn’t have given up his Belles Lettres and his Giordano Bruno for anything in the world. He loved his true friends, his dog Chiron and his land, the beautiful and bitter Calabria, all with the same intensity.

Many universities abroad would have liked to have him at any price. But he chose to remain in Cosenza, to educate generations of young Calabrians. Some of them were seen crying their eyes out during his secular funeral. I saw similar tears in Nuccio’s eyes so many times when he spoke of his master Alain-Philippe Segonds.

Not all of his academic colleagues liked him. Success, beauty and happiness are rarely forgiven. But could someone like him have reduced himself to an epigone of some academic conventicle? No, he couldn’t. His horizon was the world, upon which he radiated his explosive energy.

France, which welcomed him with open arms and mutual love from an early age, was Nuccio’s second home. His best-known book, L’utilité de l’inutile, was first written in French and only later published in Italian. Since then, it has been translated into about forty different languages. In Spain and South America, Nuccio was and will remain an example of civil commitment, culminating in the Princesa de Asturias prize that he was supposed to receive from the King of Spain in October.

News of this success reached him during his stay at IHES in April and May 2023. What was this writer doing at IHES? Nothing human was foreign to him. As a great specialist in the Italian Renaissance, he advocated the unity of knowledge as the source of a true civilization. As the world’s leading expert on Giordano Bruno, he knew well the scientific revolution and the cultural role of science and mathematics, something that scientists themselves ignore sometimes.

And so Nuccio, through me, had made friends with Alain Connes, Thibault Damour and Laurent Lafforgue. Friendship is the only thing that, when shared, increases rather than diminishes. His dialogues with these researchers were published in Italy in the newspaper “Il Corriere della sera”.

During his stay at IHES, he established friendly relations with the permanent members, as well as with other visitors and the staff. All were deeply affected by his unexpected death.

The conversations he had with Maxim Kontsevich and Hugo Duminil-Copin are gone with him and will remain in his heart. In a strange twist of fate, IHES was the last stop on Nuccio Ordine’s journey on this earth.

The world now mourns the loss of a great intellectual and a passionate defender of being human. I, and IHES, I believe, mourn the loss of an irreplaceable friend.

Ugo Moschella
Professor of Theoretical Physics
Università dell’Insubria

Cédric Villani, IHES-University of Lyon Chair in Analysis since September 2022, wanted to set up a program that would give children, who are not familiar with the profession, access to research from an early age in order to awaken their minds and perhaps inspire them to take it up.

Thus, 41 students from the 7th grade of the Aimé Césaire middle school in Les Ulis, accompanied by four teachers, came to IHES on Monday, March 27 to discover the profession of researcher.

After visiting the Institute in small groups, they gathered in the amphitheater of the Marilyn and James Simons Conference Center. Cédric Villani first presented his career and research and then gave the floor to the post-doctoral students, all mathematicians, who gave a short presentation: Veronica Fantini on proof in mathematics, Edmund Heng on fractions and Mirek Olšák on computer science. Student participation was strong and there were many questions.

The afternoon ended with a snack during which the students were able to exchange with the speakers in an informal manner.

This first session for middle school students was very much appreciated by all participants, students and speakers alike.

The second session took place on June 1st with 29 students from a 7th grade class of the Mondétour middle school. The program remained on the same basis as the first session. This time, after Cédric Villani’s talk, Veronica Fantini gave a short presentation on units of measurement. Mirek Olšák explained how computers could solve problems, using as an example the problem of the rider’s game (in reference to the sculpture Skolem, Lump Bumps and Windy Figures). The students were delighted to learn about the scientific profession and the Bois-Marie estate.

It is with great sadness that IHES and Friends of IHES have learnt of the passing of former invited professor and member of the Friends of IHES Board of Directors Robert J. Zimmer, Chancellor Emeritus and 13^th President of the University of Chicago.

Zimmer received his master’s degree and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University. He taught and carried out his research at several universities including the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. As a mathematician, he specialized in Lie groups, ergodic theory and differential geometry.

It is in Chicago that he started holding several administrative positions within the University. He served as the Chairman of the Department of Mathematics, Deputy Provost, and Vice President for Research and Argonne National Laboratory before he moved to Brown University as Provost in 2002. He returned to the University of Chicago as President in 2006, thus becoming the 13^th President, a role that he held until September 2021, when he stepped down to become Chancellor. He resigned from this role in July 2022, leaving an unprecedented legacy.

Robert J. Zimmer developed a strong relationship with IHES over the years. He was invited to the Institute for the first time by Dennis Sullivan and spent the academic year 1979-80 at IHES, benefiting from a Sloan Fellowship from the University of Chicago.

He was later invited again at IHES by Misha Gromov and Alain Connes, and came in 1992 with his family.

It is thanks to Zimmer, that the 50th anniversary of IHES was celebrated in 2008 also at the University of Chicago, where he hosted a special event in the presence of Bernard Saint-Donat, then Chairman of Friends of IHES, and Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, then Director of IHES.

Robert J. Zimmer joined the Friends of IHES Board of Directors in November 2021 and until the end of 2022.

He reminisced about his time at the Institute with fondness and will be remembered with deep affection and respect for all his accomplishments both as a mathematician and as a visionary leader.

On May 9, IHES organized a public event highlighting the work and career of mathematicians Nathalie Ayi and Tina Nikoukhah. The aim of the event was to raise awareness on gender diversity issues in mathematics, a field in which women are still underrepresented, and the date was in proximity to May 12, which was chosen by the international community to celebrate women in mathematics. The date coincides with the birthday of the first woman to receive the Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017).

Nathalie Ayi, an Associate Professor at the Jacques-Louis Lions Laboratory (CNRS/Sorbonne University), gave a talk entitled “Some considerations about social dynamics models“, in which she introduced some models of social dynamics, after having briefly spoken about her academic background. The presentation was followed by an informal conversation with Tina Nikoukhah, post-doctoral fellow at the Centre Borelli of ENS Paris-Saclay. The discussion took place in the format of the podcast “Tête-à-tête chercheuse(s)“, that Nathalie Ayi created and that she presents.

The discussions with the audience that followed the two interventions were punctuated with enthusiastic questions, facilitated by Veronica Fantini and Dmitry Vaintrob, both post-doctoral researchers in mathematics at the Institute.

In his introduction to the event, IHES Director Emmanuel Ullmo reminded the audience of the importance of bridging the gender gap in mathematics and more specifically at IHES. The Institute shares with the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard (FMJH) a strong commitment to implement concrete initiatives to achieve this goal. For years now, the FMJH has partnered with IHES to organize events on this subject matter, as Director of the FMJH Pascal Massart stressed in his closing remarks.

The Institute was honored to welcome Laure Darcos, Senator of Essonne, who with her presence marked her support for the initiatives implemented by IHES.

The evening also gave IHES the opportunity to acknowledge and thank the sponsors who have already committed to supporting diversity at the Institute: the ENGIE Foundation and the Agilent Technologies Foundation.

The participants also had the opportunity to visit the exhibition “Mathématiques, informatique… avec elles !“, created by the association femmes et mathématiques.

Find here the videos of the event.

 

New event organized by Les Amis de l’IHES on Wednesday March 31, 2023 at 6:00 pm (French Time) at IHES

Etienne Ghys (ENS -CNRS Lyon researcher, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences) gave a conference (in French) entitled:

“A brief history of the soccer ball”

What we like about soccer balls is more often to kick them than to examine their seams.
However, not all soccer balls behave in the same way and, if you look closely, they are often very different.
Étienne Ghys first observes them as a geometrician and questions the secrets of their design: how does one build an object as close as possible to a sphere? Although they share a common shape, why do soccer balls follow different trajectories?

Next event on Tuesday October 3rd 2023,  17H00 with Claudia SILVA, photographer, and Oscar GARCIA-PRADA, mathematician.

This shared conference is organized as part of the opening of the photography exhibition on the Kolam designs.

Contact: Ingrid Peeters (01 60 92 66 64)

Mathematicians Frank Merle, CY Cergy Paris Université-IHES Chair in Analysis, Pierre Raphaël, holder of the Schlumberger Chair for mathematical sciences at IHES and Professor at the University of Cambridge, Igor Rodnianski, Professor at Princeton University, and Jérémie Szeftel, CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne Université and a regular visitor of IHES, have been awarded the 2023 Clay Research Award by the Clay Mathematics Institute, “in recognition of their profound contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations.”

The award acknowledges their groundbreaking contributions to the understanding singular solutions for the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations, as well as to the establishment of the existence of finite energy singular solutions for the supercritical defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

This profound work recognized by the Clay Research Award was published in a series of three articles [1,2,3] published in 2022, that are the result of a ten-year collaboration between the four researchers. Many of the meetings and discussions that have led to this extraordinary work took place at IHES, with which three of the four researchers have very strong ties.

The Clay Research Award is presented every year at the Clay Research Conference and it celebrates the outstanding achievements of the world’s most gifted mathematicians. This year’s conference will take place in September 2023 in Oxford.

Frank Merle, Pierre Raphaël, Igor Rodnianski and Jérémie Szeftel also received the 2023 Bôcher Memorial Prize of the American Mathematical Society, acknowledging the importance of these same contributions, earlier this year.

IHES warmly congratulates all four mathematicians on receiving this prestigious award.

 

[1] On the implosion of a compressible fluid II: singularity formation. Ann. of Math. (2) 196 (2022), no. 2, 779–889. arXiv:1912.11009

[2] On the implosion of a compressible fluid I: smooth self-similar inviscid profiles. Ann. of Math. (2) 196 (2022), no. 2, 567–778. arXiv:1912.10998

[3] On blow up for the energy super critical defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger equations. Invent. Math. 227 (2022), no. 1, 247–413. arXiv:1912.11005

Photo © IHES / Fanny Dufour
From left to right: Jérémie Szeftel, Frank Merle, Pierre Raphaël, Igor Rodnianski

On the occasion of the International Day of Women in Mathematics, as part of the “May12” initiative, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques celebrates women mathematicians, with a public event in the presence of Nathalie Ayi, Associate Professor at the Jacques-Louis Lions Laboratory (CNRS/Sorbonne University), and Tina Nikoukhah, post-doctoral researcher at the Borelli Center of ENS Paris-Saclay.

The event will take place on Tuesday, May 9, 2023 at 5:00 pm at the Marilyn and James Simons Conference Center, IHES.

Nathalie Ayi is a mathematician specializing in partial differential equations and their application to the kinetic theory of gases. She is also the author, director and presenter of “Tête-à-tête chercheuse(s)“, a podcast where, every month since September 2022, she exchanges with researchers in mathematics, but not only. After giving a presentation explaining her research and her background, she will exchange with Tina Nikoukhah to learn more about her experience as a researcher and her exciting work on image processing, detecting image forgeries.

Participants will have the opportunity to visit the exhibition “Mathematiques, informatique… avec elles !“, created by the French association of women in mathematics, femmes et mathématiques.

 

The discussion will be followed by a cocktail.

Register

This event is organized in partnership with the Fondation Mathématique Jacques Hadamard.

Press release – 2 May 2023

A historical partner of IHES, the ENGIE Foundation has recently made a gift to IHES supporting early-stage researchers and female visitors at the Institute.

This support will contribute directly to the Institute’s operational budget, to finance both the organization of summer schools and the visits of women researchers to IHES.

The IHES summer schools are a major annual event at the Institute aimed at scientists at the beginning of their careers, doctoral students or post-doctoral fellows. By supporting these events, the ENGIE Foundation contributes to the transmission of knowledge and the training of new generations of researchers. In 2023, the ENGIE Foundation will support the summer school “Advances in algebraic K-theory“.

By supporting the visits of women researchers to IHES, the ENGIE Foundation strengthens its action to make scientific careers more accessible to women, who remain under-represented, especially in mathematics and theoretical physics, two key subjects at IHES.

With this new gift to IHES, the ENGIE Foundation goes even further in its commitment to support excellence in fundamental research at the highest international level, standing alongside early-stage researchers and women scientists.

In 2023, the ENGIE Foundation’s gift will be used to support in particular the visit of Delaram Kahrobaei, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Honorary Chair of Cybersecurity at the University of York in the United Kingdom and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University.

Prof. Kahrobaei first visited IHES in 2004, when she was an assistant professor at the University of St. Andrews, UK, and she recently returned to IHES for a three-week visit, which will be funded thanks to the support of the ENGIE Foundation.

Read Delaram Kahrobaei’s portrait on the ENGIE website and discover here her video testimony as part of the series “Voices of Women at IHES”.

The ENGIE Foundation is committed to contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals in three areas: “Helping Children & Education”, “Access to Energy, Biodiversity & Climate” and “Employment and the Fight against Poverty”.

The Foundation’s three main priorities meet a single requirement: to take care of life and our planet, and to meet the needs of vulnerable or remote populations.

The ENGIE Foundation is convinced that the role of women is essential to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, the ENGIE Foundation supports projects according to the following four criteria

• Strengthening women’s leadership and participation, particularly through education, access to culture and integration through employment
• Fighting against violence against women and against precariousness
• Strengthening women’s economic empowerment, particularly through access to energy
• Committing to gender equality.

Supporting impactful projects, participating in the collective effort of the 2030 Agenda and carrying ENGIE’s raison d’être are what guides the ENGIE Foundation’s action every day.

IHES was saddened to learn of the passing of theoretical physicist Stanley Deser, emeritus Ancell Professor at Brandeis University and Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Caltech.

Born in 1931 in Rovno, then Poland, he lived in Paris during the years 1935-1940, and arrived in the United States in May 1941. He graduated cum laude at Brooklyn College and attended Harvard Graduate School, obtaining a master’s degree in 1950 and his PhD in 1953, under the supervision of Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger.

After holding post-doctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (1953-1955) and at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen (1955-1957), he worked as an instructor at Harvard (1957-1958), before joining Brandeis University as an Associate Professor in 1958. He spent the rest of his career there, becoming emeritus professor in 2005. For an enthralling account of his life, see his autobiography  “Forks in the Road: A Life in Physics” (2021).

Stanley Deser made many lasting contributions to theoretical physics. He is notably known for: pioneering (in collaboration with Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner) the Hamiltonian approach to gravity (including the definition of the total mass-energy of a space-time); making foundational work on the field-theoretical approach to gravity; and establishing (in collaboration with Bruno Zumino) the existence of a consistent, locally supersymmetric extension of general relativity, called supergravity.

He received numerous awards including the Dannie Heineman Prize and the Einstein Medal. He was a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Torino Academy, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy. He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Stockholm and Gothenburg.

Prof. Deser developed very strong connections with the Institute. He first stayed at the Ormaille residence during academic year 1966-1967, while he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and came back several times afterwards as a visitor between 1973 and 1976, and later to collaborate with Thibault Damour (who joined IHES as a permanent professor in 1989). Prof. Deser was also a member of the IHES Scientific Council from 1991 to 1996.

He was a founding member of Friends of IHES, the Institute’s partner organization in the United States, alongside Henri Moscovici and Bernard Saint-Donat.

Members of IHES and Friends of IHES who have had a chance to meet him remember him fondly.

Thanks to François Duminil’s initiative, Hugo Duminil-Copin’s father and deputy principal of the Alain Fournier middle school in Orsay, Hugo Duminil-Copin gave two talks on April 19th and 20th for middle and high schoolers from the Massy area.

A first conference, organized on April 19th in the magnificent Michelin lecture hall of CentraleSupélec, in collaboration with Diagonale of Université Paris-Saclay, holder of the SAPS label (science with and for society), brought together more than 400 middle schoolers. This talk, introduced by Fred Courant from Esprit Sorcier TV, was broadcasted on the Esprit Sorcier and Université Paris-Saclay YouTube channels. Hugo Duminil-Copin answered several questions on his research and career, both from middle schoolers attending the event in person but also from participants who followed the conference online. Jérôme Bourne Branchu, academy inspector and academic director of the national education services of Essonne (DSDEN), attended this event, as well as regional pedagogical inspectors and mathematics teachers. Middle schoolers from Briis-sous-Forges, Bures-sur-Yvette, Gif-sur-Yvette, les Ulis, Massy, ​​Orsay, Palaiseau, Verrières-le-Buisson and Villebon-sur-Yvette participated in the conference. The Essonne departmental council supported the event by facilitating all bus journeys for middle schoolers, in the framework of its agreement with Université Paris-Saclay.

Watch the replay of this event:

Hugo Duminil-Copin gave a second talk in the Lycée de la Vallée de Chevreuse on April 20th. He first attended a course in a last-year class speacilized in mathematics (12th grade). After a discussion with high school math teachers, Hugo gave a conference for 140 students from high schools located in the area. Many questions were again asked both on his research and his career. Olivier Delmas, deputy academic director of the national education services of Essonne, as well as regional pedagogical inspectors in mathematics, attended the event. Hugo’s talk was broadcasted on IHES YouTube channel. The recording is available below for replay.

The network “Archives scientifiques Paris-Saclay” and the libraries associated to Université Paris-Saclay are organizing a one-day workshop on:

“Digitization: an asset to enhance our scientific archives” on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, bith in presence, in Orsay, or online.

This day is open to all professionals interested in information and communication technology, and to researchers.

The aim of the event is to :
– promote exchanges on the issue of scientific archives and their development
– bring information to anyone who has a project – in progress or to come – of digitization of scientific archives.

More information is available at this link.

Please register before Tuesday, May 23: https://admin-sphinx.universite-paris-saclay.fr/v4/s/h8v59b