Alain Connes

Alain Connes is a French mathematician and theoretical physicist who works in operator algebras and noncommutative geometry. He was born on 1 April 1947 in Draguignan, a town near Cannes in the Provence region of southeast France, entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1966 and graduated in 1970. His thesis, A classification of factors of type III, concerned von Neumann algebras and was supervised by Jacques Dixmier. He was appointed professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette in 1979, spent eight years as director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and also holds a professorship at the Collège de France.