Emmanuel Giroux

Emmanuel Giroux (born 1961) is a blind French geometer known for his research on contact geometry and open book decompositions.^[1][2]

Education and career

Giroux has Marfan syndrome, because of which he became blind at the age of 11.^[1][2] He earned a doctorate from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 1991 under the supervision of François Laudenbach (fr).^[3]

He has been the director of the Unit of Mathematics, Pure and Applied (UMPA) at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.^[2][4] In 2015, he left Lyon to co-direct the Unité Mixte International of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.^[5]

Mathematical contributions

Giroux is known for finding a correspondence (the eponymous Giroux correspondence^[6]) between contact structures on three-dimensional manifolds and open book decompositions of those manifolds. This result allows contact geometry to be studied using the tools of low-dimensional topology. It has been called a breakthrough by other mathematicians.^[7]

In 2002 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.^[8]