Search Clay Mathematics Institute

  • About
    About
    • About
    • History
    • Principal Activities
    • Who’s Who
    • CMI Logo
    • Policies
  • Programs & Awards
    Programs & Awards
    • Programs & Awards
    • Funded programs
    • Fellowship Nominations
    • Clay Research Award
    • Dissemination Award
  • People
  • The Millennium Prize Problems
    The Millennium Prize Problems
    • The Millennium Prize Problems
    • Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
    • Hodge Conjecture
    • Navier-Stokes Equation
    • P vs NP
    • Poincaré Conjecture
    • Riemann Hypothesis
    • Yang-Mills & the Mass Gap
    • Rules for the Millennium Prize Problems
  • Online resources
    Online resources
    • Online resources
    • Books
    • Video Library
    • Lecture notes
    • Collections
      Collections
      • Collections
      • Euclid’s Elements
      • Ada Lovelace’s Mathematical Papers
      • Collected Works of James G. Arthur
      • Klein Protokolle
      • Notes of the talks at the I.M.Gelfand Seminar
      • Quillen Notebooks
      • Riemann’s 1859 Manuscript
  • Events
  • News

Home — News — Clay Award for Dissemination

Clay Award for Dissemination

Date: 29 May 2015

Photo of Etienne Ghys
Photo by F. Caterini

The first Clay Award for Dissemination of Mathematical Knowledge has been made to Étienne Ghys in recognition of his own important contributions to mathematical research and for his distinguished work in the promotion of mathematics. 

Étienne Ghys  is a CNRS Directeur de Recherche at ENS, Lyon.  He has published outstanding  work in his own fields of geometry and dynamics,  both under his own name and under the collaborative pseudonym “Henri Paul de Saint Gervais”—contributions recognised by invitations to speak at the International Congress in 1990 and by his elevation to the French Académie des Sciences in 2004.  He has also given invaluable service to the international mathematical community in many contexts, as a member of the program committee for the ICM in Hyderabad, as a member of the Fields Medal committee in 2014, and through service on many other bodies. 

But it  is through his work in the promotion of mathematics in France and elsewhere that he has become a legend.  He has given numerous carefully crafted lectures to audiences ranging from school children to delegates at the International Congress in 2006, when he gave a beautiful and exceptionally clear plenary lecture on Knots and dynamics.  He has enthusiastically embraced modern technology to aid the exposition of deep ideas, for example during his editorship of Images des mathématiques, which he transformed to an online publication in 2009, and which received more than five million visits over his five-year term of office. He himself has written more than 90 articles for Images, as well as a monthly column in Le Monde.  

He created with others the Maison de mathématiques et informatique  in Lyon and co-founded, with Dierk Schleicher, the International summer school of mathematics for young students. His series of films, produced with Aurélien Alvarez and Jos Leys and published as DVDs and online in many languages, has had a huge impact on high school students.  The first, Dimensions, has been downloaded more than a million times.

The award will be presented after a public lecture by Professor Ghys  in Oxford on October 1,  2015.

Image:  F. Caterini

Share

More news

See all news
17 March 2025

STEM for Britain 2025

Congratulations to Edwina Yeo (University College London), winner of The Parliamentary & Scientific Committee’s STEM for Britain Gold Medal, sponsored by CMI, for her poster Preventing bacterial surface contamination via mathematical modelling.

Read more
12 February 2025

Babbage Archive

Oxford’s History of Science Museum holds important material associated with Charles Babbage, including components of Babbage’s first (unfinished) mechanical computing machine and an archive of his personal notes about his machines. With support from CMI, the Museum undertook a project to conserve and digitise this precious archive of Babbage material. Image courtesy of the History […]

Read more
2025 Clay Research Fellows
16 January 2025

2025 Clay Research Fellows

The Clay Mathematics Institute is pleased to announce that Ryan Chen, Alex Cohen and Anna Skorobogatova have been awarded Clay Research Fellowships. Ryan Chen will receive his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2025, where he works under the guidance of Wei Zhang. Ryan has been appointed as a Clay Research Fellow for […]

Read more
Image of the Clay Research Award
01 May 2024

2024 Clay Research Award

Read more
See all news
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact CMI

© 2025 Clay Mathematics Institute

Site by One