Emmanuel Giroux

Emmanuel Giroux is a blind French geometer known for his research on contact geometry and open book decompositions.[1][2]

Education and career

Giroux has Marfan syndrome, because of which he became blind at the age of 11.[1][2] He earned a doctorate from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1991 under the supervision of François Laudenbach.[3]

He has been the director of the Unit of Mathematics, Pure and Applied (UMPA) at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.[2][4] In 2015, he left Lyon to co-direct the Unité Mixte International of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.[5]

Mathematical contributions

Giroux is known for finding a correspondence between contact structures on three-dimensional manifolds and open book decompositions of those manifolds. This result allows contact geometry to be studied using the tools of low-dimensional topology. It has been called a breakthrough by other mathematicians.[6]

In 2002 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.[7]

References
  1. Jackson, Allyn (November 2002), "The world of blind mathematicians" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 49 (10): 1246–1251.
  2. Herzberg, Nathaniel (June 22, 2015), "Emmanuel Giroux, menuisier des maths", Le Monde (in French).
  3. Emmanuel Giroux at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. UMPA, ENS de Lyon, archived from the original on 2015-09-27, retrieved 2015-10-03.
  5. Contact, Unité Mixte International, retrieved 2015-10-03.
  6. Etnyre, John B.; Ozbagci, Burak (2008), "Invariants of contact structures from open books", Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 360 (6): 3133–3151, arXiv:math/0605441, doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-08-04459-0, MR 2379791.
  7. ICM Plenary and Invited Speakers since 1897, International Mathematical Union, retrieved 2015-10-03.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.