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Claude LeBrun

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Claude LeBrun
LeBrun in 2012
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipUnited States
Alma materRice University
University of Oxford
Known forLeBrun manifolds
LeBrun-Salamon Conjecture
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsStony Brook University
Doctoral advisorRoger Penrose
Doctoral studentsChristina Tønnesen-Friedman

Claude R. LeBrun(born 1956) is an American mathematician who holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Mathematics atStony Brook University.Much of his research concerns theRiemannian geometryof 4-manifolds, or related topics in complex and differential geometry.

After enrolling as an undergraduate atRice Universityat age 16, LeBrun received hisMaster of Artsin mathematics fromRicein 1977. He then went on to earn hisD.Phil.(Oxford equivalent of a Ph.D.) from theUniversity of Oxfordin 1980, for a thesis on complex differential geometry written under the supervision ofRoger Penrose.[1]That same year, he then accepted his first faculty position at Stony Brook.[2] Although he would eventually go on to spend most of his career at Stony Brook, he has also held positions at a number of other institutions, including theInstitut des Hautes Études Scientifiques,theMathematical Sciences Research Institute,and theInstitute for Advanced Study.[3]

He is the namesake of theLeBrun manifolds,a family of self-dual manifolds that he discovered in 1989 and that was named after him byMichael AtiyahandEdward Witten.[4]LeBrun is also known for his work onEinstein manifoldsand theYamabe invariant.In particular, he produced examples showing that theconverseof theHitchin–Thorpe inequalitydoes not hold: there exist infinitely many four-dimensional compact smooth simply connectedmanifoldsthat obey the inequality but do not admit Einstein metrics.

LeBrun was an invited speaker at the 1994International Congress of Mathematicians.[2]In 2012, he became a Fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[5]In 2016, a conference in his honor was held in Montreal.[6] In 2018, he became a Simons Foundation Fellow in Mathematics.[7]In 2020, he was appointed as Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York.[8]

References[edit]

  1. ^Claude R. LeBrunat theMathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^abMath Department and Institute Faculty - by Rank,Stony Brook University, retrieved 2013-01-30.
  3. ^A Community of Scholars | Institute for Advanced Study, retrieved 2013-05-15.
  4. ^Atiyah, Michael;Witten, Edward(2003), "M-theory dynamics on a manifold of G2 holonomy",Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics,6(1): 1–106,arXiv:hep-th/0107177,Bibcode:2001hep.th....7177A,doi:10.4310/ATMP.2002.v6.n1.a1,ISSN1095-0761,S2CID119433129
  5. ^List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society,retrieved 2013-01-27.
  6. ^Conference on Differential Geometry,retrieved 2016-10-08.
  7. ^Simons Foundation,retrieved 2018-04-28.
  8. ^Stony Brook University,retrieved 2020-12-10.