François Lalonde is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in symplectic geometry and symplectic topology. Lalonde received from the Université de Montréal in 1976, at the age of 20, his bachelor's degree in physics and, after a year to complete the bachelor in mathematics in 1977, he received in 1979 his master's degree in logic and theoretical computer science. In 1985 he received his doctorate in mathematics from the Université de Paris-Sud in Orsay becoming one of the rare candidates obtaining the Doctorat d'Etat before the age of thirty. He then was an NSERC University Research Fellow at Université du Québec à Montréal where he became full professor in 1991 until 2001. He is professor at the Université de Montréal since 2001, holding the Canada Research Chair in symplectic topology when this program was first set up by the Prime Minister of Canada. He has held invited positions at many institutions, including the IHES, Harvard University, the Université de Strasbourg, the University of Tel Aviv, the École Polytechnique, Stanford University, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and the Université d'Aix-Marseille. With Octav Cornea he developed a new homology, leading to a new universal Floer homology for pairs of Lagrangian submanifolds of a symplectic manifold. He has also collaborated with Dusa McDuff and Leonid Polterovich. He became Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997 at the age of 41, Fellow of the Fields Institutein 2001 when this distinction was launched. From 2000 to 2002 he was a Killam Fellow, a private-public foundation in arts and sciences that enables Canadian researchers to devote most of their time to their works. From 2004 to 2008 and from 2011 to 2013 he was the director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, the premier scientific institute in Canada founded in 1968. Members of this institute have won the "Nobel Prize" in computer sciences in 2019 and the Wolf Prize in physics in 2018, considered as the most prestigious prize in physics after the Nobel, leading usually to the Nobel prize in physics. He founded several institutions, namely the Institut des Sciences Mathématiques, the first unified doctoral school in the world with 250 professors, the Centre interuniversitaire de recherches en géométrie différentielle et en topologie, the Institut transdisciplinaire de recherches en informatique quantique with Gilles Brassard and Michael Hilke, the Unité mixte internationale, a joint venture between the CNRS and the Centre de recherches mathématiques, and the journal Annales mathématiques du Québec. In 2005, he was the Stanford Distinguished Lecturer and the Andreas Floer Memorial Lecturer. In 2006 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Lagrangian submanifolds: from the local model to the cluster complex at the ICM in Madrid. In 1995, his series of papers in Inventiones Mathematicae, with Dusa McDuff, was chosen by the Abstracts of the American Mathematical Society, that surveys most mathematical publications worldwide, as one of the most influential that year.
Selected publications
New trends in symplectic geometry, C.R. Math. Rep. Acad. Sci. Canada, New Series, vol. 19, 1997, pp. 33–50
with Dusa McDuff and Leonid Polterovich: Topological rigidity of Hamiltonian loops and quantum homology, Inventiones Mathematicae, vol. 135, 1999, pp. 369–385
with McDuff: The geometry of symplectic energy, Annals of Mathematics, vol. 141, 1995, pp. 349–371
with McDuff: Hofer's -geometry: energy and stability of Hamiltonian flows, Inventiones Mathematicae, vol. 122, 1995, parts 1,2, pp. 1–34, 35–69
with McDuff: J-holomorphic curves and the classification of rational and ruled symplectic 4-manifolds, in C. B. Thomas Symplectic and Contact Geometry, Cambridge University Press 1996
Energy and capacities in symplectic topology, in W.H. Kazoo Geometric Topology, Studies in Advanced Mathematics, American Mathematical Society/International Press, vol. 2, 1997, pp. 328–374
with McDuff: Local Non-Squeezing Theorems and Stability, Geometric and Functional Analalysis, vol. 5, 1995, p. 364
with Michèle Audin and L. Polterovich: Symplectic rigidity: Lagrangian submanifolds, in M. Audin, J. Lafontaine, Holomorphic Curves in Symplectic Geometry, Progress in Mathematics, vol. 117, 1995, pp. 271–322
with Shengda Hu: A relative Seidel morphism and the Albers map, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 362, pp. 1135–1168
as editor:
with Miguel Abreu and Leonid Polterovich : New Perspectives and Challenges in Symplectic Field Theory, The CRM Proceedings and Lecture Notes 49, 342
with Paul Biran and O. Cornea : Morse theoretical methods in symplectic topology and non-linear analysis, Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
with Yakov Eliashberg and Boris Khesin : Symplectic and Contact Topology: Interactions and Perspectives, Proceedings of the workshop on Symplectic topology and higher dimensional Gauge invariants, Fields Institute Communications 35, AMS
as sole editor: Proceedings of the CRM Workshop on Geometry, Topology and Dynamics , CRM Proceedings and Lecture Notes 15, AMS
with Jacques Hurtubise : Gauge Theory and Symplectic Geometry, Proceedings of the NATO Summer Advanced Institute on Gauge Theory and Symplectic Geometry, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
