Marius Nicolae Crainic (; February 3, 1973,

Aiud Aiud (; , , Hungarian pronunciation: ; ) is a city located in Alba County, Transylvania, Romania. The city's population is 21,307 (2021). It has the status of municipiu. The city derives its name ultimately from Saint Giles (Aegidius), to whom t ...

) is a

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

n mathematician working in the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

Education and career

Born in

, Romania, Crainic obtained a bachelor's degree at

Babeș-Bolyai University The Babeș-Bolyai University ( , , commonly known as UBB) is a public research university located in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Established in 1581 as Academia Claudiopolitana, it underwent several reorganizations over the centuries, eventually taking ...

(

Cluj-Napoca Cluj-Napoca ( ; ), or simply Cluj ( , ), is a city in northwestern Romania. It is the second-most populous city in the country and the seat of Cluj County. Geographically, it is roughly equidistant from Bucharest (), Budapest () and Belgrade ( ...

) in 1995. He then moved to the Netherlands and obtained a master's degree in 1996 at

Nijmegen University Radboud University (abbreviated as RU, , formerly ) is a public research university located in Nijmegen, Netherlands. RU has seven faculties and more than 24,000 students. Established in 1923, Radboud University has consistently been included in ...

. He received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 2000 from

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public university, public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of ...

under the supervision of

Ieke Moerdijk Izak "Ieke" Moerdijk (; born 23 January 1958) is a Dutch mathematician, currently working at Utrecht University, who in 2012 won the Spinoza Prize. Education and career Moerdijk studied mathematics, philosophy and general linguistics at the Uni ...

. His Ph.D. thesis is titled "''Cyclic cohomology and characteristic classes for foliations''". He was a Miller Research Fellow at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

from 2001 to 2002. He then returned to Utrecht University as a Fellow of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

(KNAW). In 2007 he became an associate professor at Utrecht University, and since 2012 he is a full professor. In 2016 he was elected member of KNAW. In 2008 Crainic was awarded the André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson Geometry and in 2016 he received the

De Bruijn De Bruijn is a Dutch surname meaning "the brown". Notable people with the surname include: * (1887–1968), Dutch politician * Brian de Bruijn (b. 1954), Dutch-Canadian ice hockey player * Chantal de Bruijn (b. 1976), Dutch field hockey defender * ...

Prize. In July 2020 he was an invited speaker to the 8th

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 ...

, which has been rescheduled to 2021 due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

Research

Crainic's research interests lie in the field of

differential geometry Differential geometry is a Mathematics, mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of Calculus, single variable calculus, vector calculus, lin ...

and its interactions with

topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

. His specialty is

Poisson geometry In differential geometry, a field in mathematics, a Poisson manifold is a smooth manifold endowed with a Poisson structure. The notion of Poisson manifold generalises that of symplectic manifold, which in turn generalises the phase space from Hami ...

and modern aspects of

Lie theory In mathematics, the mathematician Sophus Lie ( ) initiated lines of study involving integration of differential equations, transformation groups, and contact (mathematics), contact of spheres that have come to be called Lie theory. For instance, ...

, with several contributions to foliation theory,

symplectic geometry Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the ...

Lie groupoid In mathematics, a Lie groupoid is a groupoid where the set \operatorname of objects and the set \operatorname of morphisms are both manifolds, all the category operations (source and target, composition, identity-assigning map and inversion) are sm ...

non-commutative geometry Noncommutative geometry (NCG) is a branch of mathematics concerned with a geometric approach to noncommutative algebras, and with the construction of ''spaces'' that are locally presented by noncommutative algebras of functions, possibly in some ge ...

, Lie pseudogroups and the geometry of PDEs. Among his most well-known results are a solution to the long-standing problem of describing the obstructions to the integrability of Lie algebroids and a new geometric proof of Conn's linearization theorem, both written in collaboration with Rui Loja Fernandes, as well as the development of the theory of representations up to homotopy. He is the author of more than 30 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and has supervised 10 PhD students as of 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crainic, Marius 1973 births Living people People from Aiud Babeș-Bolyai University alumni Utrecht University alumni Academic staff of Utrecht University 21st-century Romanian mathematicians Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences