Emmanuel Giroux (born 1961) is a blind French

geometer A geometer is a mathematician whose area of study is geometry. Some notable geometers and their main fields of work, chronologically listed, are: 1000 BCE to 1 BCE * Baudhayana (fl. c. 800 BC) – Euclidean geometry, geometric algebra * ...

known for his research on

contact geometry In mathematics, contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution (differential geometry), distribution in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. ...

and

open book decomposition In mathematics, an open book decomposition (or simply an open book) is a decomposition of a closed oriented 3-manifold ''M'' into a union of surfaces (necessarily with boundary) and solid tori. Open books have relevance to contact geometry, with a ...

s...

Education and career

Giroux has

Marfan syndrome Marfan syndrome (MFS) is a multi-systemic genetic disorder that affects the connective tissue. Those with the condition tend to be tall and thin, with long arms, legs, fingers, and toes. They also typically have exceptionally flexible joints a ...

, because of which he became blind at the age of 11. He earned a doctorate from the

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon The École normale supérieure de Lyon (also known as ENS de Lyon, ENSL or Normale Sup' Lyon) is a French grande école located in the city of Lyon. It is one of the four prestigious écoles normales supérieures in France. The school is ...

in 1991 under the supervision of François Laudenbach. He has been the director of the Unit of Mathematics, Pure and Applied (UMPA) at the

École normale supérieure de Lyon The École normale supérieure de Lyon (also known as ENS de Lyon, ENSL or Normale Sup' Lyon) is a French grande école located in the city of Lyon. It is one of the four prestigious écoles normales supérieures in France. The school is ...

. In 2015, he left Lyon to co-direct the Unité Mixte International of the

Centre national de la recherche scientifique The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science Basic research, also called pure research o ...

and the

Centre de Recherches Mathématiques The Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) is the first mathematical research institute in Canada, located at the Université de Montréal. The CRM has ten research laboratories, one in each of: mathematical analysis, number theory and symbol ...

, in

Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple-pea ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

Mathematical contributions

Giroux is known for finding a correspondence between contact structures on three-dimensional

manifold In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...

s and

s of those manifolds. This result allows contact geometry to be studied using the tools of

low-dimensional topology In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot th ...

. It has been called a breakthrough by other mathematicians. In 2002 he was an

invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians This is a list of International Congresses of Mathematicians Plenary and Invited Speakers. Being invited to talk at an International Congress of Mathematicians has been called "the equivalent, in this community, of an induction to a hall of fame." ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Giroux, Emmanuel 1961 births Living people French mathematicians French blind people Blind academics People with Marfan syndrome Scientists with disabilities