In this talk we will don't speak about Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) but about Lagrange's reception at the nineteenth Century. "Who read Lagrange at this Times?", "Why and How?", "What does it mean being a mathematician or doing mathematics at this Century" are some of the questions of our conference. We will give some elements of answers and the case Lagrange will be a pretext in order to explain what are doing historians of mathematics: searching archives and – thanks to a methodology – trying to understand, read and write the Past.
Lagrange - mathematical press - complete works - bibliographic index of mathematical sciences (1894-1912) - Liouville - Boussinesq - Terquem[-]

Left-handed flows are 3-dimensional flows which have a particular topological property, namely that every pair of periodic orbits is negatively linked. This property (introduced by Ghys in 2007) implies the existence of as many Bikrhoff sections as possible, and therefore allows to reduce the flow to a suspension in many different ways. It then becomes natural to look for examples. A construction of Birkhoff (1917) suggests that geodesic flows are good candidates. In this conference we determine on which hyperbolic orbifolds is the geodesic flow left-handed: the answer is that yes if the surface is a sphere with three cone points, and no otherwise.
dynamical system - geodesic flow - knot - periodic orbit - global section - linking number - fibered knot[-]

I will discuss some recent results with Aaron Brown and Zhiren Wang on actions by higher rank lattices on nilmanifolds. I will present the result in the simplest case possible, $SL(n,Z)$ acting on $Tn$, and try to present the ideas of the proof. The result imply existence of invariant measures for $SL(n,Z)$ actions on $Tn$ with standard homotopy data as well as global rigidity of Ansosov actions on infranilmanifolds and existence of semiconjugacies without assumption on existence of invariant measure.[-]

Boris Hasselblatt held the Jean Morlet Chair from November 2013 to April 2014 with Serge Troubetzkoy (Aix-Marseille Université) as local project leader.
The scientific focus of this Chair is on hyperbolic dynamical systems and related topics. This is a broad and active area of research throughout the world which is on one hand at the core of Boris Hasselblatt's research record and interests and on the other hand well represented in the Marseille region.
Moreover, hyperbolic dynamics has broad interactions with numerous other areas of dynamical systems and mathematics: partial differential equations viewed as infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, celestial mechanics, statistical mechanics, geometry (of nonpositively curved manifolds),Teichmüller theory, topology, to name a few.
In addition, hyperbolic dynamics is important to a broad range of subjects in applied mathematics.
CIRM - Chaire Jean-Morlet 2013 - Aix-Marseille Université[-]

Swiss-born mathematician Nicola Kistler was the first holder of the Jean-Morlet Chair for mathematical sciences at CIRM and, in that capacity, became the first visiting researcher in residence for six months at the Centre. His stay at CIRM lasted from early February till July 2013. He set up a program of mathematical events focusing on 'Probability', with the collaboration of Véronique Gayrard, local project leader working at Marseille's Laboratoire d'Analyse, Topologie, Probabilités (ex LATP - now I2M).
CIRM - Chaire Jean-Morlet 2013 - Aix-Marseille Université[-]

Everything is under control: mathematics optimize everyday life.
In an empirical way we are able to do many things with more or less efficiency or success. When one wants to achieve a parallel parking, consequences may sometimes be ridiculous... But when one wants to launch a rocket or plan interplanetary missions, better is to be sure of what we do.
Control theory is a branch of mathematics that allows to control, optimize and guide systems on which one can act by means of a control, like for example a car, a robot, a space shuttle, a chemical reaction or in more general a process that one aims at steering to some desired target state.
Emmanuel Trélat will overview the range of applications of that theory through several examples, sometimes funny, but also historical. He will show you that the study of simple cases of our everyday life, far from insignificant, allow to approach problems like the orbit transfer or interplanetary mission design.[-]

The most important works of the young Lagrange were two very learned memoirs on sound and its propagation. In a tour de force of mathematical analysis, he solved the relevant partial differential equations in a novel manner and he applied the solutions to a number of acoustic problems. Although Euler and d'Alembert may have been the only contemporaries who fully appreciated these memoirs, their contents anticipated much more of Fourier analysis than is usually believed. On the physical side, Lagrange properly explained the functioning of string and air-column instruments, although he did not accept harmonic analysis as we now understand it.
Lagrange - acoustics - propagation of sound - harmonic analysis - Fourier analysis - vibrating strings - organ pipes[-]

I will discuss recent progress on understanding the dimension of self-similar sets and measures. The main conjecture in this field is that the only way that the dimension of such a fractal can be "non-full" is if the semigroup of contractions which define it is not free. The result I will discuss is that "non-full" dimension implies "almost non-freeness", in the sense that there are distinct words in the semigroup which are extremely close together (super-exponentially in their lengths). Applications include resolution of some conjectures of Furstenberg on the dimension of sumsets and, together with work of Shmerkin, progress on the absolute continuity of Bernoulli convolutions. The main new ingredient is a statement in additive combinatorics concerning the structure of measures whose entropy does not grow very much under convolution. If time permits I will discuss the analogous results in higher dimensions.[-]