Augustin Banyaga

Last updated
Augustin Banyaga
Born (1947-03-31) March 31, 1947 (age 77)
NationalityRwandan-American
Alma mater University of Geneva
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Pennsylvania State University
Thesis Sur la structure des groupes de difféomorphismes qui préservent une forme symplectique  (1976)
Doctoral advisor André Haefliger

Augustin Banyaga (born March 31, 1947) is a Rwandan-born American mathematician whose research fields include symplectic topology and contact geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Contents

Biography

He earned his Ph.D. degree in 1976 at the University of Geneva under the supervision of André Haefliger. [1] (Banyaga was the first person from Rwanda to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics. [2] ) He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1977–1978), [3] Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University (1978–1982), and assistant professor at Boston University (1982–1984), before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 1984 as associate professor. He was promoted to full professor in 1992.

In 2009 Banyaga was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, and in 2015 he was named a Distinguished Senior Scholar by Pennsylvania State University. [4]

He has made significant contributions in symplectic topology, especially on the structure of groups of diffeomorphisms preserving a symplectic form (symplectomorphisms). One of his best-known results states that the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a compact, connected, symplectic manifold is a simple group; in particular, it does not admit any non-trivial homomorphism to the real line.

Banyaga is an editor of Afrika Matematica , the journal of the African Mathematical Union, and an editor of the African Journal of Mathematics. He has supervised the theses of 9 Ph.D. students. [1]

Bibliography

Articles
Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Differential geometry</span> Branch of mathematics dealing with functions and geometric structures on differentiable manifolds

Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Milnor</span> American mathematician

John Willard Milnor is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and the only mathematician to have won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize and all three Steele prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symplectic geometry</span> Branch of differential geometry and differential topology

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 Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics where the phase space of certain classical systems takes on the structure of a symplectic manifold.

In mathematics, a symplectomorphism or symplectic map is an isomorphism in the category of symplectic manifolds. In classical mechanics, a symplectomorphism represents a transformation of phase space that is volume-preserving and preserves the symplectic structure of phase space, and is called a canonical transformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dusa McDuff</span> English mathematician

Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Buchstaber</span> Soviet and Russian mathematician

Victor Matveevich Buchstaber is a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his work on algebraic topology, homotopy theory, and mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford Taubes</span> American mathematician

Clifford Henry Taubes is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taubes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yakov Eliashberg</span> Russian-American mathematician

Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthias Kreck</span> German mathematician

Matthias Kreck is a German mathematician who works in the areas of Algebraic Topology and Differential topology. From 1994 to 2002 he was director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics and from October 2006 to September 2011 he was the director of the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics at the University of Bonn, where he is currently a professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert W. Brooks</span> American mathematician

Robert Wolfe Brooks was a mathematician known for his work in spectral geometry, Riemann surfaces, circle packings, and differential geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenji Fukaya</span> Japanese mathematician

Kenji Fukaya is a Japanese mathematician known for his work in symplectic geometry and Riemannian geometry. His many fundamental contributions to mathematics include the discovery of the Fukaya category. He is a permanent faculty member at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and a professor of mathematics at Stony Brook University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergei Tabachnikov</span> American mathematician

Sergei Tabachnikov, also spelled Serge, is an American mathematician who works in geometry and dynamical systems. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Louis Cohen</span> American mathematician

Ralph Louis Cohen is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology and differential topology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viktor Ginzburg</span> Russian-American mathematician

Viktor L. Ginzburg is a Russian-American mathematician who has worked on Hamiltonian dynamics and symplectic and Poisson geometry. As of 2017, Ginzburg is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francis Bonahon</span> French mathematician

Francis Bonahon is a French mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology.

François Lalonde is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in symplectic geometry and symplectic topology.

Kaoru Ono is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in symplectic geometry. He is a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) at Kyoto University.

Yongbin Ruan is a Chinese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and symplectic geometry with applications to string theory.

John Boyd Etnyre is an American mathematician at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his research fields include contact geometry, symplectic geometry and low-dimensional topology. He earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Texas, Austin under the supervision of Robert Gompf. Etnyre was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 1997-2001. He was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania prior to joining the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oh Yong-Geun</span>

Oh Yong-Geun is a mathematician and distinguished professor at the Pohang University of Science and Technology and founding director of the IBS Center for Geometry and Physics located on that campus. His fields of study have been on symplectic topology, Floer homology, Hamiltonian mechanics, and mirror symmetry He was in the inaugural class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society and has been a member of Institute for Advanced Study, Korean Mathematical Society, and National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Korea and is on the editorial boards of Journal of Gokova Geometry and Topology and Journal of Mathematics of Kyoto University.

References