Marie-France Vignéras (born 1946) is a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. She is a Professor Emeritus of the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. She is known for her proof published in 1980 of the existence of

isospectral In mathematics, two linear operators are called isospectral or cospectral if they have the same spectrum. Roughly speaking, they are supposed to have the same sets of eigenvalues, when those are counted with multiplicity. The theory of isospectr ...

non-isometric

Riemann surface In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a connected one-dimensional complex manifold. These surfaces were first studied by and are named after Bernhard Riemann. Riemann surfaces can be thought of as deformed vers ...

s. Such surfaces show that one cannot hear the shape of a hyperbolic drum. Another highlight of her work is the establishment of the mod-l

local Langlands correspondence In mathematics, the local Langlands conjectures, introduced by , are part of the Langlands program. They describe a correspondence between the complex representations of a reductive algebraic group ''G'' over a local field ''F'', and representati ...

for GL(n) in 2000. Her current work concerns the p-adic

Langlands program In mathematics, the Langlands program is a set of conjectures about connections between number theory, the theory of automorphic forms, and geometry. It was proposed by . It seeks to relate the structure of Galois groups in algebraic number t ...

Early life and education

Born in 1946, Vignéras was the daughter of Janine Mocudé and Robert Vignéras (sea captain and pilot in the port of Dakar). She spent her childhood in

Senegal Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. It borders Mauritania to Mauritania–Senegal border, the north, Mali to Mali–Senegal border, the east, Guinea t ...

, and did her high school studies at the lycée Van-Vollenhoven in Dakar. She moved to the

University of Bordeaux The University of Bordeaux (, ) is a public research university based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France. It has several campuses in the cities and towns of Bordeaux, Dax, Gradignan, Périgueux, Pessac, and Talence. There are al ...

after receiving her baccalauréat in Senegal. She received the agrégation de mathématiques in 1969 and the doctorat d'Etat in 1974; her thesis was written under the direction of Jacques Martinet.

Career

Vignéras served as Director of Mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Sèvres from 1977 to 1983. At the conclusion of her term at the ENS, she rejoined her colleagues at the University of Paris 7. Since 2010 she has been Emeritus Professor. Vignéras has made numerous invited visits to foreign universities and institutes, including the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the University of California at Berkeley, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She has been the

Emmy Noether Amalie Emmy Noether (23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She also proved Noether's theorem, Noether's first and Noether's second theorem, second theorems, which ...

Professor at the

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...

and has been an invited speaker at the

European Congress of Mathematics The European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) is the second largest international conference of the mathematics community, after the International Congresses of Mathematicians (ICM). The ECM are held every four years and are timed precisely betwee ...

(Barcelona, 2000) and the International Congress of Mathematics (Beijing, 2002). Her thesis students include Jean-Loup Waldspurger (directeur de recherches at the C.N.R.S.), Jean-Francois Dat (professor at l'Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6)), Rachel Ollivier (associate professor at the University of British Columbia) and Tony Ly.

Awards

Vignéras received the Médaille Albert Chatelet in 1978, the Médaille d'argent of the C.N.R.S. in 1984, the Prix von Humboldt in 1985 and the of the

French Academy of Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...

in 1997. She became a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

in 2017. She was elected to the 2018 class of Fellows of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

Selected publications

* * * * *

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Vigneras, Marie-France 1946 births Living people 20th-century French mathematicians 21st-century French mathematicians University of Bordeaux alumni Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Members of Academia Europaea 20th-century French women mathematicians 21st-century French women mathematicians