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April 22-26, 2024
at IHES - Centre de conférence Marilyn et James Simons
On the occasion of Hélène Esnault's 70th birthday, Marco D'Addezio, IRMA Strasbourg, Kay Rülling, Univ. Wuppertal, and Tanya Srivastava, IIT Gandhinagar, organize a conference in her honor from April 22 to 26, 2024.
This conference centers around the mathematical contributions and interests of Hélène Esnault. It aims at bringing together mathematicians with diverse backgrounds, providing a platform to exchange their ideas and foster new collaborations.
Registration deadline: January 31, 2024
Invited Speakers:
- Tomoyuki Abe, IPMU - University of Tokyo
- Yves André, IMJ-PRG
- Emelie Arvidsson, University of Utah
- Bhargav Bhatt, IAS - Princeton University & University of Michigan
- Ana Caraiani, Imperial College London
- Dustin Clausen, IHES
- Johan De Jong, Columbia University
- Michael Groechenig, University of Toronto
- Lars Hesselholt, Nagoya University & University of Copenhagen
- Katharina Hübner, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
- Moritz Kerz, Universität Regensburg
- Marc Levine, Universität Duisburg-Essen
- Daniel Litt, University of Toronto
- Alexander Petrov, Harvard University
- Claude Sabbah, École polytechnique
- Peter Scholze, MPIM - University of Bonn
- Atsushi Shiho, University of Tokyo
- Carlos Simpson, Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis
- Vasudevan Srinivas, SUNY, Buffalo
- Jakob Stix, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
Scientific Committee: Marco D'Addezio (IRMA Strasbourg), Marcin Lara (Goethe Universität-Frankfurt), Simon Pépin Lehalleur (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), Kay Rülling (Universität Wuppertal), Annette Werner (Goethe Universität-Frankfurt), and Lei Zhang (Sun Ya-Tsen Univ. Zhuhai)
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Hélène Esnault is a mathematician specializing in algebraic and arithmetic geometry. She obtained her PhD in 1976 at the University of Paris VII under the direction of Lê Dũng Tráng. She then completed her habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1985. Afterwards, she was a Heisenberg scholar at the MPI in Bonn and maître de conférence in Paris VII. In 1990, she became a full professor at the Universität Duisburg-Essen. In 2012, she moved to Berlin as the first Einstein Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she became emerita in 2019. She continued her mathematical work and accepted a visiting professor position in 2019 at IAS Princeton. From there, she moved back to Europe in 2020. In the fall 2022, she held the Eilenberg Chair at Columbia University and is currently a part-time professor at Copenhagen University and a Faculty Associate at Harvard University.
As a mathematician, she published more than 135 research articles with 45 coauthors covering a wide range of topics. In the following, only a small extract of her influential oeuvre is mentioned. In the 1980’s, she found together with Eckart Viehweg a new method to prove vanishing theorems in algebraic geometry. At the end of the 1990s, she gave with Vasudevan Srinivas and Viehweg the first general construction of an Albanese variety for singular projective varieties over an algebraically closed field. At the beginning of the 2000s, she proved that a Fano variety over a finite field has a rational point, answering positively a conjecture of Lang-Manin. She furthermore showed that a smooth projective variety over a local field with a regular model has a rational point in the special fiber if the étale cohomology of the generic fiber has coniveau 1. With Spencer Bloch and Pierre Berthelot, she proved that Serre’s Witt vector cohomology of a singular proper variety in positive characteristic is the slope <1 part of rigid cohomology, generalizing results of Bloch and Illusie in the smooth case. A spectacular result is her proof with Vikram Mehta in 2010 of a conjecture by Gieseker, which says, there are no non-constant stratified bundles on a geometrically simply connected smooth projective variety over a perfect field of positive characteristic. She proved with Bloch and Moritz Kerz a p-adic infinitesimal version of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture. A result that recently has drawn much attention is her joint work with Michael Groechenig on the integrality of certain rigid local systems, which was conjectured by Carlos Simpson.
Hélène Esnault has mentored about 25 PhD students and even more postdocs. In recognition of her seminal contributions, she was awarded the Doisteau-Blutet prize of the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 2001, jointly with Eckart Viehweg the Leibniz Prize in 2003 and received the Cantor medal of the German Mathematical Society in 2019. She received multiple honorary doctorates and was a member of various significant committees, including the Fields Medal Committee of the ICM 2018, the Structure Committee ICM 2022, the Shaw Prize Committee 2021-2020 and 2021-2025, and the Infosys Prize Committee 2023. Additionally, she has served on the editorial boards of several prestigious journals, including the Duke Mathematical Journal (since 1995), Mathematische Annalen (1998–2010), Mathematical Research Letters (since 2007), Algebra and Number Theory (since 2007 as a founding editor), Memoirs of the European Mathematical Society (since 2023), and Acta Mathematica (since 2023).
The conference receives partial support from the GRK 2240: Algebro-geometric Methods in Algebra, Arithmetic and Topology
