On March 14th, 2019 at Université Paris-Descartes, the French Minister for National Education and Youth Jean-Michel Blanquer and the CEO of the CNRS Antoine Petit signed a letter of intent regarding the launching of Mathematics Year in 2019/2020.
The Wolf Prize for Mathematics, the third most prestigious distinction in Mathematics after the Abel Prize and the Fields Medal, has been awarded in 2019 jointly to Jean-Francois Le Gall from the University Paris Sud "for his profound and elegant works on stochastic processes", and to Gregory Lawler from Chicago University.
In a recent work, Quentin Mérigot, Jocelyn Meyron and Boris Thibert developed an algorithm which enables to conceive and to build a whole series of optical components, lenses or mirrors, capable of transferring light radiation in an optimal and precise way. Their work is based on new numerical methods which prove very efficient to solve certain optimal transport problems.
Read the full article (in French)
About the authors:
Jean-François Le Gall is a Professor at Université Paris-Sud. He is laureate, together with Gregory Lawler, Professor at Chicago University, of the 2019 Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
Would you tell us about your research work?
Model theory is a branch of mathematical logic. Its modern history dates back to 1962. There is a way of measuring the size of the objects of model theory. At the end of the 1970s, the mathematicians Cherlin and Zilber made a conjecture concerning this size issue. While the logicians' community was starting to doubt the veracity of the conjecture, Olivier Frécon recently proved that the conjecture is true in an important particular case.
In 1949, the Hungarian mathematician István Sándor Gál, then research associate (attaché de recherche) at the CNRS, publishes the demonstration of a conjecture dating back to the 1930s, concerning the maximum size of a quantity of arithmetic nature belonging to a large family whose elements are now called "sums of Gál type". Not until the works of Lewko et Radziwiłł in 2017 was this result specified in the particular case considered by Gál.
Poincaré-Koebe's theorem of uniformization enables to build a geometrical classification of surfaces. In 1984, Beauville and Bomogolov generalized this classification by considering a subset of varieties of greater dimensions: compact Kähler manifolds with trivial canonical bundle. In a recent work, F. Loray, J.V. Pereira and F. Touzet give a foliated version of this generalisation. Their paper describes the structure of singular codimension one foliations with numerically trivial canonical bundle on complex projective manifolds.
A senior researcher at the CNRS, Catherine Goldstein was invited as a plenary speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. She answered our questions.
"What is it that you like in mathematics?" "What does this congress mean to you?"
The Annales Henri Lebesgue is a generalist journal of mathematics, fully open access and free of author charges. A non-profit journal, it is supported by public institutions.
