François Lalonde

In 2005 and in 2022, he was the Stanford Distinguished Lecturer. He was the Andreas Floer Memorial Lecturer (UC Berkeley) in 2005. In 2006 he was an Invited Speaker with talk Lagrangian submanifolds: from the local model to the cluster complex at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid.

From 2004 to 2008 and from 2011 to 2013 he was the director of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM), the premier scientific institute in Canada founded in 1968, based at Université de Montréal. Members of this institute have won the "Nobel Prize" in computer sciences (Turing Prize, Yoshua Bengio) in 2019 and the Wolf Prize in physics in 2018 (Gilles Brassard), considered as the most prestigious prize in physics after the Nobel, leading usually to the Nobel prize in physics. In 2022, James Maynard (Oxford) was awarded the Fields Medal after his postdoctoral year in the CRM-ISM postdoctoral program that Lalonde founded.

He became Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997 at the age of 41, Fellow of the Fields Institute in 2001 when this distinction was introduced. 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.

He has held invited positions at many institutions, including the IHES (1983–1985), Harvard University (1989–1990), the Université de Strasbourg (1990), the University of Tel Aviv (1997 and 1999), the École Polytechnique (2001-2002), Stanford University (2005 and 2022), the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2008), and the Université d'Aix-Marseille (2015).

Lalonde received from the Université de Montréal in 1976, at the age of 20, his bachelor's degree (called licence in France) 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 (complexity theory and NP-completeness). In 1985 he received his doctorate (Doctorat d'Etat) in mathematics from the Université de Paris-Saclay in Orsay becoming one of the rare candidates obtaining the Doctorat d'Etat before the age of thirty. He then was an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) University Research Fellow at Université du Québec à Montréal where he became, six years later, full professor in 1991 until 2000. He is professor at the Université de Montréal since 2000, holding from 2001 to 2022 the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in differential geometry and topology when the CRC program was first set up by the Prime Minister of Canada.

François Lalonde (born 17 September 1955) is a Canadian mathematician, specializing in symplectic geometry and symplectic topology.