Frédéric Pham (born 17 November 1938 in

Saigon , population_density_km2 = 4,292 , population_density_metro_km2 = 697.2 , population_demonym = Saigonese , blank_name = GRP (Nominal) , blank_info = 2019 , blank1_name = – Total , blank1_ ...

) is a Vietnamese-French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is known for the Brieskorn-Pham manifolds (explicit examples of

exotic sphere In an area of mathematics called differential topology, an exotic sphere is a differentiable manifold ''M'' that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the standard Euclidean ''n''-sphere. That is, ''M'' is a sphere from the point of view of al ...

s).

Education and career

Pham studied from 1957 to 1959 at the

École polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

. From 1961 to 1969 he worked at

Saclay Nuclear Research Centre The CEA Paris-Saclay (formerly CEA Saclay) center is one of nine centers belonging to the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The Saclay site hosts the administrative headquarters of the CEA. Historically, it was the hea ...

, where he developed his doctoral thesis. In addition, during those years, he attended the seminar conducted by

René Thom René Frédéric Thom (; 2 September 1923 – 25 October 2002) was a French mathematician, who received the Fields Medal in 1958. He made his reputation as a topologist, moving on to aspects of what would be called singularity theory; he became w ...

at the

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, just ...

(IHES). In 1969 Pham received his Ph.D. with supervisor

Raymond Stora Raymond Félix Stora (18 September 1930 – 20 July 2015) was a French theoretical physicist. He was a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), as well as a member of CERN's theory group. His work focused ...

from

Saclay Saclay () is a commune in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. It had a population of 3,067 in 2006. It is best known for the large scientific facility CEA Saclay, mostly dealing with nuclear and pa ...

with thesis ''Singularités des processus de diffusion multiple''. He became in 1970 a professor at the

University of Nice Sophia Antipolis The University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (french: Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) was a university located in Nice, France and neighboring areas. It was founded in 1965 and was organized in eight faculties, two autonomous institutes and an eng ...

and retired there in 2001 as professor emeritus. He was a visiting professor in

Hanoi Hanoi or Ha Noi ( or ; vi, Hà Nội ) is the capital and second-largest city of Vietnam. It covers an area of . It consists of 12 urban districts, one district-leveled town and 17 rural districts. Located within the Red River Delta, Hanoi is ...

for the academic year 1979–1980. He was a frequent visitor at the Institut Fourier in

Grenoble lat, Gratianopolis , commune status = Prefecture and commune , image = Panorama grenoble.png , image size = , caption = From upper left: Panorama of the city, Grenoble’s cable cars, place Saint- ...

. His research deals with analytic singularities of Feynman integrals, Landau singularities in S-matrix theory, singularities of systems of plane algebraic curves, microlocal analysis, function theory of several complex variables, semiclassical approximations in quantum mechanics, and Sato's

hyperfunction In mathematics, hyperfunctions are generalizations of functions, as a 'jump' from one holomorphic function to another at a boundary, and can be thought of informally as distributions of infinite order. Hyperfunctions were introduced by Mikio Sato ...

s. Pham in the 1960s applied Thom's methods of differential topology to Landau singularities and in the 1970s worked with

Bernard Teissier Bernard Teissier (; born 1945) is a French mathematician and a member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group. He has made major contributions to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, specifically to singularity theory, multiplicity theory and va ...

on singularities of systems of plane algebraic curves. In 1970 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Nice with talk (''Fractions lipschitziennes et saturation de Zariski des algèbres analytiques complexes'').

Sources

*André Voros and Bernard Malgrange ''Les travaux de Frédéric Pham'', Parts 1,2, Annales de l’Institut Fourier, vol. 53, 2003, p. 957
Publications de Frédéric Pham

Selected publications

''Singularities of integrals. Homology, hyperfunctions and microlocal analysis''
Springer Verlag, 2011. *''Singularités des systèmes différentiels de Gauss-Manin'', Birkhäuser, 1979. *''Introduction à l’étude topologique des singularités de Landau'', Mémorial des Sciences Mathématiques, vol. 164, Paris, Gauthier-Villars 1967. *with Nguyen Tien Dai and Nguyen Huu Duc: ''Singularités non dégénérées des systèmes de Gauss-Manin réticulés'', Montreuil, Gauthier-Villars, 1981. *as editor: ''Hyperfunctions and theoretical physics'', Springer Verlag, 1975. (Conference at Nice May 1973) *''Singularités des courbes planes: une introduction à la géometrie analytique complexe'', École polytechnique, 1972. *''Fonctions d’une ou deux variables'' Collections Sciences Sup, Dunod, 2003. *''Les différentielles'', Masson, 1996.
''Formules de Picard-Lefschetz généralisées et ramification des intégrales''
Bulletin Societé Mathématique de France, vol. 93, 1965, pp. 333–367.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pham, Frederic 1938 births Living people Vietnamese emigrants to France 20th-century Vietnamese mathematicians Mathematical physicists Academic staff of Côte d'Azur University