Augustin Banyaga
Augustin Banyaga (born March 31, 1947) is a Rwandan-born American mathematician whose research fields include symplectic topology and contact geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University.
He earned his PhD degree in 1976 at the University of Geneva, under the supervision of André Haefliger. We list a few of his career highlights:
- Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1977-1978).
- Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University (1978-1982).
- Assistant Professor at Boston University (1982-1984).
- Associate Professor at the Pennsylvania State University in 1984.
- Full Professor at the Pennsylvania State University since 1992.
- Associate professor at the Université d'Abomey-Calavi since 2004.
- Elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2009.
- In 2015, named Distinguished Senior Scholar by the Pennsylvania State University.
Banyaga has made significant contributions in symplectic topology on the structure of the symplectomorphism groups, and to several classical problems in mathematics, including Klein's Program and the Weinstein conjecture. One of his well-known result is that the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a compact, connected, symplectic manifold is a simple group.
He is an editor of Afrika Matematica, the journal of the African Mathematical Union, an editor of the African Journal of Mathematics. Augustin Banyaga is a Visiting Professor of the Institut de Mathématiques et de Sciences Physiques (IMSP) since 1998. He has supervised many PhD students of the Institute.