First Harald Bohr lecturer: Étienne Ghys (ENS, Lyon)

Étienne Ghys will talk about “The topology of a curve in the neighborhood of a singular point”. He writes:

“I would like to start with a clever (and elementary) observation of M. Kontsevich. When we draw the graphs of four real polynomials in one variable intersecting in some point, some local qualitative pictures turn out to be impossible. I will then generalize to any number of polynomials and then to singularities of real algebraic curves. Some interesting algebraic structures appear and open questions arise…”

The lecture will be on Tuesday, October 28, 2014 at 15:15 in Auditorium 1.

Étienne Ghys is an outstanding mathematician, whose research focuses mainly on geometry and dynamical systems, though his mathematical interests are very broad. He also expresses much interest in the historical development of mathematical ideas, especially the contributions of Henri Poincaré.

Alumni of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he is currently a CNRS “directeur de recherche” at the prestigious École normale supérieure in Lyon. He was editor-in-chief of the Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS and he is a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

In 2006 he was a Plenary invited speaker at the ICM in Madrid. In 2014, he delivered the laudations for the Fields Medalist Artur Avila at the ICM in Seoul.

More about Étienne Ghys:

• Personal homepage
• Video & slides: Knots and dynamics, International Congress of Mathematicians Madrid 2006 (look for fourth session)
• Video: Etienne Ghys’ laudations for the Fields Medalist Artur Avila at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Seoul, August 2014
• Étienne Ghys co-authored the movie ‘Dimensions: A walk through mathematics!’