Emmanuel Giroux (born 1961) is a blind

French French may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France ** French people, a nation and ethnic group ** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices Arts and media * The French (band), ...

geometer 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 in the tangent bundle satisfying a condition called 'complete non-integrability'. Equivalently, such a distribution ...

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 dolichostenomelia, long arms, legs, Arachnodactyly, fingers, and toes. They also typically ha ...

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

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon École or Ecole 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 * Éco ...

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

École normale supérieure de Lyon École or Ecole 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 * Éco ...

. 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 (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

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 symbolic ...

, in

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Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

Mathematical contributions

Giroux is known for finding a correspondence (the eponymous ''Giroux 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 theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, ...

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

invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians An invitation system is a method of encouraging people to join an organization, such as a Club (organization), club or a website. In regular society, it refers to any system whereby new members are chosen; they cannot simply apply. In relation to w ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Giroux, Emmanuel 1961 births Living people 20th-century French mathematicians French blind people Blind scholars and academics People with Marfan syndrome French scientists with disabilities 21st-century French mathematicians