Marie-France Vignéras facts for kids
Marie-France Vignéras (born in 1946) is a famous French mathematician. She is a Professor Emeritus (meaning she's retired but still connected) at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. She is well-known for her important discovery in 1980. She proved that there are different shapes that can sound exactly the same! Imagine two drums that look different but make the same sound when you hit them. Her work showed this was possible in a special type of math called Riemann surfaces.
Early Life and School
Marie-France Vignéras was born in 1946. Her father was a sea captain and pilot in Dakar, Senegal. She grew up in Senegal and went to high school there. After finishing high school, she moved to France to study at the University of Bordeaux. She earned a high-level math teaching degree called the agrégation de mathématiques in 1969. Later, in 1974, she completed her doctorat d'Etat, which is like getting a PhD in math.
Her Career in Mathematics
From 1977 to 1983, Marie-France Vignéras was the Director of Mathematics at a special school called the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Sèvres. After that, she joined her colleagues at the University of Paris 7. Since 2010, she has been an Emeritus Professor.
Professor Vignéras has traveled a lot for her work. She has visited many famous universities and research centers around the world. These include the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany, the University of California at Berkeley in the USA, and Harvard University. She was also an Emmy Noether Professor at the University of Göttingen. She has given talks at big math events, like the European Congress of Mathematics in 2000 and the International Congress of Mathematics in 2002.
She has also guided many students who went on to become successful mathematicians. Some of her students include Jean-Loup Waldspurger, Jean-Francois Dat, Rachel Ollivier, and Tony Ly.
Awards and Honors
Marie-France Vignéras has received many awards for her important work in mathematics:
- In 1978, she won the Médaille Albert Chatelet.
- In 1984, she received the Médaille d'argent from the C.N.R.S. (a French research organization).
- In 1985, she was given the Prix von Humboldt.
- In 1997, she won the Prix Petit d'Ormoy, Carrière, Thébault from the French Academy of Sciences.
- In 2017, she became a member of the Academia Europaea, which is a group of top European scientists.
- In 2018, she was chosen as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a big honor in the math world.
