Daniel Bennequin (3 January 1952) is a French mathematician, known for the
Thurston–Bennequin number (sometimes called the Bennequin number) introduced in his doctoral dissertation.
Education and career
Bennequin completed his secondary education at
Lycée Condorcet
The Lycée Condorcet () is a secondary school in Paris, France, located at 8, rue du Havre, in the city's 9th arrondissement. Founded in 1803, it is one of the four oldest high schools in Paris and also one of the most prestigious. Since its inc ...
and then graduated from the
École normale supérieure
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
. He received his
habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...
(Doctoral d'Etat) in 1982 from the
University of Paris VII under
Alain Chenciner
Alain Chenciner (born 23 October 1943, in Villeneuve-sur-Lot) is a French mathematician, specializing in dynamical systems with applications to celestial mechanics.
Chenciner studied from 1963 to 1965 at the École polytechnique and did research ...
with thesis ''Entrelacements et équations de Pfaff''. He was a professor at the
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg (, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. Founded in the 16th century by Johannes Sturm, it was a center of intellectual life during ...
before becoming a professor at the University of Paris VII (Institut Mathématique de Jussieu).
Bennequin's dissertation was a major contribution to
contact geometry
In mathematics, contact geometry is the study of a geometric structure on smooth manifolds given by a hyperplane distribution in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. Equivalently, such a distribution ...
, in which he gave the first example of an exotic contact structure embedded in Euclidean 3-space. On the basis of their work in the 1980s Bennequin and
Yakov Eliashberg might be considered the founders of contact topology. Bennequin also works on
motion planning
Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...
. He was a member of
Bourbaki Bourbaki(s) may refer to :
Persons and science
* Charles-Denis Bourbaki (1816–1897), French general, son of Constantin Denis Bourbaki
* Colonel Constantin Denis Bourbaki (1787–1827), officer in the Greek War of Independence and serving in the ...
.
Selected publications
* ''L'instanton gordien, d'après P. B. Kronheimer et T. S. Mrowka'', Séminaire Bourbaki Nr. 770, 1992/93
numdam* ''Monopôles de Seiberg-Witten et conjecture de Thom, d'après Kronheimer, Mrowka et Witten'', Séminaire Bourbaki Nr. 807, 1995/96
numdam* ''Caustique mystique, d'après Arnold et. al.'', Séminaire Bourbaki, Nr. 634, 1984/85
numdam* ''Problèmes elliptiques, surfaces de Riemann et structures symplectiques, d'après M. Gromov'', Séminaire Bourbaki, Nr. 657, 1985/86
numdam* ''Topologie symplectique, convexité holomorphe et structures de contact, d'après Y. Eliashberg, D. Mc Duff et al'', Séminaire Bourbaki, Nr. 725, 1989/90
numdam* ''Dualités de champs et de cordes, d’après t'Hooft, Polyakov, Witten et al.'', Séminaire Bourbaki, Nr. 899, 2001/02
numdam* ''Les Bords des revêtements ramifiés des surfaces'', ENS 1977
References
External links
Conference in honor of Bennequin, 2012
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bennequin, Daniel
1952 births
Living people
20th-century French mathematicians
21st-century French mathematicians
Academic staff of the University of Strasbourg
Academic staff of the University of Paris
École Normale Supérieure alumni
Nicolas Bourbaki