Serge Marc Cantat (born 3 June 1973, in Paris) [1] is a French mathematician, specializing in geometry and dynamical systems. [2]
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Cantat received his PhD under the supervision of Étienne Ghys in 1999 at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. [3] Cantat is a directeur de recherche of CNRS at the Institut de recherches mathématiques de Rennes (University of Rennes 1). He was previously directeur de recherche of CNRS at ENS Paris.
His research deals with complex dynamics and dynamics of automorphisms of algebraic surfaces. He examined the algebraic structure of Cremona groups (i.e. groups of birational automorphisms of -dimensional projective spaces over a field ) and showed with Stéphane Lamy that for an algebraically closed field and for dimension the Cremona group is not a simple group. In particular, if is the field of complex numbers and , the Cremona group contains an infinite non-countable family of different normal subgroups.
In 2018, Cantat was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. In 2012 he received the Prix Paul Doistau–Émile Blutet for his work on dynamic systems (and especially holomorphic dynamic systems). In 2012 he was an invited speaker at the European Congress of Mathematics in Kraków. In 2012 he was awarded the Prix La Recherche. In 2025, he received the CNRS Silver Medal. [4]
