Newsletters
October 2025
Who is currently visiting
Departure: Rémi has finished his internship with Matthew at the MSI, but hasn't quite returned to France yet. He has moved to the other side of campus for an internship in nuclear physics. Double win for the ANU!
Student intern:
Lucas.
Upcoming talk
Come listen to Alice speak about Statistical models for the degradation of RNA on Monday 20 October at 1pm.
IRL supporting ANU students
One of our PhB students, Yuki Ishihara, just completed a great introduction to research project (ASC) under the supervision of Sandro Vaienti, focusing on statistical properties of dynamical systems.
This was a nice example of how ANU students can benefit from French staff being posted to the IRL. While there is no expectation that IRL staff supervise ANU student projects, or teach special topics or reading courses, this is enthusiastically encouraged! This would typically be done in collaboration with ANU staff (for instance, Pierre co-supervised Yuki).
So, if you have some advanced teaching (i.e. ASC, special topics courses, Honours/Master supervision) plans that could benefit from a collaboration with Sylvie, Alice, Hoel, or Pascal, feel free to talk to them! If you are looking for creative ways to make this work, feel free to ask Pierre.
Papers
Po Lam has just finished this paper with Tony Carbery, Zane Kun Li and Yixuan Pang on Mizohata-Takeuchi-type inequalities for the moment curve: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04345
Travel
Sylvie is on her way back from visits to Marseille and Karlsruhe, including speaking at this conference.
Po Lam will give an online seminar talk at Virginia Tech on October 29, on joint work with Andrew, Pierre, and Jan Rozendaal.
Hoel will give an online talk on October 26 at the AMS Special Session on Quantum Supergroups in Low-Dimensional Topology
Reminder: acknowledging the IRL
It is much appreciated if you can remember to acknowledge the IRL on your papers and talk slides. The preferred way to refer to the IRL is as "France-Australia Mathematical Sciences and Interactions ANU -CNRS International Research Laboratory".
Questions, news?
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
- papers you have just finished,
- projects you have just started,
- talks you are giving this month.
September 2025
Who is currently visiting
Arrival:
Pascal Auscher has arrived, and will stay for one year.
Student interns:
Lucas and Rémi.
Papers
Asilata, Anand, and Tony have just posted "a sphere of spherical objects" on ArXiV.
Acknowledging the IRL
It is much appreciated if you can remember to acknowledge the IRL on your papers and talk slides. The preferred way to refer to the IRL is as "France-Australia Mathematical Sciences and Interactions ANU -CNRS International Research Laboratory".
Travel
Joan and Tony are currently in Seville.
Po Lam just visited Sydney and Macquarie.
Sylvie just gave a talk at Monash.
Story
Rowena found this Interesting fact: the connection between French mathematicians and the Australian continent goes back more than 200 years! Here is the story from her.
Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, was inhabited by the Indigenous Kartun people until soon after sea levels rose about 10,000 years ago. In the 19th century the island was settled by white sealers, Palawa Aboriginal people from Tasmania, and then white farmers. In 1802 it was mapped by Matthew Flinders and French cartographer Nicholas Baudin, who named two prominent features of the island Cape Borda and Cape Cassini for two Frenchmen, both of whom were mathematicians. These names have stuck to this day and appear on Google maps, along with many other French place names bestowed by Baudin.
Jean Charles de Borda (1733-1799) was a mathematician who served in the army. He worked on the theory of projectiles, made contributions to fluid mechanics, hydrography, cartography, invented a surveying instrument called the Borda repeating circle, with which the distance from the North Pole to the equator was measured accurately, and proposed the ranked positional voting system.
From https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Borda/
Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712) was a mathematician and astronomer who became a French citizen in 1673. He made many revolutionary discoveries in the solar system, made tables of Jupiter's moons to determine longitudes by providing a universal time with which to compare the local time at various positions on the Earth, made a study of the curve which is the locus of a point the product of whose distances from two fixed foci is constant, and disagreed with many people about many things.
From https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Cassini/
Reminder: call for 2026-2027 Visitors
Do you have a colleague based in France who might like to spend a semester or two in our IRL? Applications for secondments in IRLs during the period September 2026-August 2027 are due on 15 October, and take quite a bit of time to prepare. Have your potential visitors get in touch with Sylvie or Pierre as soon as possible!
Details of the application process are given here in French and there in English.
Questions, news?
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
- papers you have just finished,
- projects you have just started,
- talks you are giving this month.
August 2025
Who is currently visiting
Departures:
Sandro and Olivier are leaving at the end of August. They have both had a highly productive stay.
Olivier learnt a lot of analysis, reaching research questions involving the use of physically informed neural networks to approximate solutions of PDE arising from mathematical finance.
Sandro finished several papers (such as this one), gave talks at ANU, Sydney, Brisbane and Wellington, supervised a PhB ASC (on dynamical systems), and started a collaboration with Diego.
We are going to miss them!
Arrival:
Pascal Auscher is arriving in September.
Student interns:
Lucas and Rémi.
To help ANU staff not based at the MSI connect with the IRL, but also simply to help mathematicians across campus to get to know each other, we are organising a small workshop on Friday 12 September, 9:30am-12pm.
The workshop will include micro-talks (10 minutes) presenting research done outside the MSI, in the language of mathematics (i.e. accessible to someone with an undergraduate education in maths, but no other prior knowledge).
Call for 2026-2027 Visitors
Do you have a colleague based in France who might like to spend a semester or two in our IRL? Applications for secondments in IRLs during the period September 2026-August 2027 are due on 15 October, and take quite a bit of time to prepare. Have your potential visitors get in touch with Sylvie or Pierre as soon as possible!
Details of the application process are given here in French and there in English.
Questions, news?
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
- papers you have just finished,
- projects you have just started,
- talks you are giving this month.
July 2025
Hoel Queffelec is also arriving on 28 July.
Rémi Allen has arrived. He is a student from the École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées, visiting Matthew Hole.
As awesome as organising conferences at MATRIX is, sometimes it is good to have space for more people, and easier travel for many participants. The CIRM in Marseille is a fantastic place to organise conferences. Getting space (and even more so funding) is competitive, but not ridiculously so. Sylvie and Pierre, in particular, have organised quite a few conferences there.
Po Lam gave a talk at Oberwolfach.
Pierre gave a talk at RIMS (Kyoto).
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
- papers you have just finished,
- projects you have just started,
- talks you are giving this month.
A/Prof. Pierre Portal (he/him)
June 2025
** Who is currently visiting**
No change from last month:
[Sylvie](https://www.i2m.univ-amu.fr/user/sylvie.monniaux/)
[Sandro](https://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~vaienti/)
Olivier Lee-Ah-Naye
Lucas Bongiorno
** Opportunities **
ANU staff can apply for visiting professor positions in France (the CNRS "postes rouges"). These are positions for 2-3 months, in French maths department located in France, funded by the CNRS (travel and accommodation costs, plus some per diem). Applications are due by 30 September 2025, for visits between February and November 2026.
To apply you need to do the following:
- Discuss your plans with a potential host department in France (typically through a potential collaborator first, then officially via the Director of said department).
- Let Sylvie and Pierre know to get IRL support.
- Prepare a CV (inc. publications in the last 5 years) and a research proposal.
Being a staff member of an IRL increase chances of success.
** French Maths Society (SMF) **
You should join! Check out [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEhSbftxjtI) to find out why, and/or ask Pierre (who is the IRL FAMSI representative of the SMF). There is a highly discounted rate for AustMS members.
** Travels **
Po Lam gave talks in Madrid and at Monash.
Joan gave a talk at the 2025 Georgia International Topology Conference.
Sylvie went to New Caledonia to present the IRL. More on this below.
** Maths in the Pacific **
Parts of France are in the Pacific region, and host Maths departments. There is one in New Caledonia, and one in [Tahiti](https://gaati.org/about/en/). These teams sometimes struggle with their isolation. Sylvie's visit to Nouméa was a first step towards potentially using the IRL FAMSI to support mathematical research in the Pacific, including both places that have a strong relationship with France and places that have a strong relationship with Australia. Sylvie, Pierre, and colleagues from Nouméa and Tahiti, are currently considering organising a conference at the ANU towards the end of 2026 to start building a network.
Let us know if you'd be keen to be involved!
We have plenty of contacts in New Zealand, of course, but note that quite a few colleagues in [Tahiti](https://gaati.org/about/en/) could interact well with MSI staff.
** Coming up **
In July or August, we will organise a small meeting with colleagues from other ANU schools who are close to the themes of the IRL and keen to talk to mathematicians.
If you have people in mind, please let Pierre or Sylvie know.
Alice Cleynen and Hoel Queffelec will arrive in July.
Pascal Auscher will arrive in September.
**Questions, news?**
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
- papers you have just finished,
- projects you have just started,
- talks you are giving this month.
--------
A/Prof. Pierre Portal (he/him) 2025
May 2025
Here is what is happening in May in our IRL.
Social catch up
Join the other IRL members in the third floor common area for a classic French cafe-croissant on Wednesday 21 May at 10am. The IRL will take care of the croissants, but bring your own coffee.
Talks
Sylvie will talk about "Navier-Stokes equations" at the Colloquium THIS Thursday (4-5pm). The talk should be accessible to everybody at MSI.
Pierre will talk about "Maximal regularity of parabolic stochastic PDE" on Monday 19 May at 1pm in the Mathematical Data Science Centre seminar series. The talk will focus on ideas and directions rather than on techniques, and should thus be fairly accessible to people interested in probability and/or analysis.
Sandro will talk about randomly perturbed dynamical systems in the Analysis&PDE seminar on Wednesday 28 May at 10am.
Who is currently visiting
Lucas Bongiorno is a master level student from Centrale Lyon, doing an internship under Sylvie's supervision from 5 May to 31 October.
No change from last month:
Sylvie
Sandro
Olivier Lee-Ah-Naye
Short term visitors
Matheus Manzatto de Castro (UNSW) visiting Sandro.
Leo Tzou (Melbourne): 3-5 June, visiting Pierre, and speaking at the Analysis&PDE seminar on Wednesday 4 June at 10am.
Travels
Several of us are traveling this month, giving talks that acknowledge the IRL, and globally speaking raising awareness of FAMSI.
Sylvie just came back from Melbourne, and is going to New Caledonia later this month.
Pierre just came back from Karlsruhe (Germany).
Sandro is currently in Sydney (UNSW), and will then be in New Zealand.
Questions, news?
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Also, if you have items for this newsletter, please send them to Pierre.
We are particularly interested in:
papers you have just finished,
projects you have just started,
talks you are giving this month,
as long as they are somewhat related to the IRL.
--------
A/Prof. Pierre Portal (he/him)
March 2025
Dear all,
As promised, here is the second of our monthly newsletters. I hope that you are all doing well. I am (very much!) enjoying a relatively stress-free first quarter of the year. I hope you are too. I find myself speaking French almost as much as I speak English at the MSI these days. It reminds me of the time where Thierry Coulhon was around!
**Who is currently visiting.**
[Sandro](https://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~vaienti/) Vaienti has arrived this week, and will stay until August.
[Sylvie](https://www.i2m.univ-amu.fr/user/sylvie.monniaux/) is fully recovered, and can often be found in the Hanna Neumann building.
Olivier Lee-Ah-Naye, a master student from Marseille, is visiting until August, supervised by Pierre, and using office 2.53. He is adding some functional analysis and operator theory to his background in probability to study some SPDE problems. Feel free to introduce yourself and your students to him!
** Funding. **
The IRL now has an account (within the CNRS in France) with some money (roughly 30k EUR per year) to support travel and other research costs. If you would like to access some of these funds, please send an email with your request to Sylvie and Pierre. The IRL Director (Sylvie) has the authority to approve spending, and the co-director (Pierre) has delegated authority in certain circumstances.
Our funding principle is that the IRL should support as many people as possible to some extent, rather than a small number of people to a large extent. For 2025, we thus plan to reimburse plane tickets only (up to 1500EUR for an International trip). We have already committed to funding plane tickets for:
- Three visiting Master students (supervised by Pierre, Matthew, and Sylvie respectively).
- Matthew going to [ITER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER).
- Two ECR coming to [Andrew's Winter School](https://maths.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/austral-winter-school-microlocal-analysis-and-non-elliptic-fredholm-theory).
- Two French researchers coming to Bryan and Peter's conference on string theory.
- Sylvie visiting departments in New Zealand and New Caledonia.
Practically, after receiving Sylvie's approval, colleagues employed in France need to book their tickets through the CNRS travel portal, while colleagues employed in Australia can book their own tickets, and receive (partial if cost is more than 1500EUR) reimbursement from the IRL.
**Questions?**
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or Pierre.
Bonne journée !
Pierre.
February 2025
Dear all,
I wanted to send you some news about the IRL, and thought that I will write this up as a newsletter. I'll aim to send one out once a month or so.
Who is currently visiting.
As you know, Sylvie has been here since mid-January. She has already gone on many adventures both in maths and in cycling, and the latter unfortunately took her to the Canberra hospital for five days last week. Good news is: we can now confirm that the French health insurance (MGEN Internationale) works well with the Canberra health system. As a consequence, Sylvie cannot come to the office as much as she would like, but she has started coming back today.
Alice has arrived today for a short visit, and will be here until February 20 (before coming back for a year later in 2025).
Responsibilities.
Besides trying to do some good maths involving people in France and people in Australia, being a member of the IRL does not come with specific responsibilities (except for Sylvie and me). The only thing we formally expect you to do is to put "CNRS-ANU International Research Laboratory FAMSI (France Australia Mathematical Sciences and Interactions)" in the signature block of your papers (and slides if you are giving a talk).
Visas.
French staff coming to the IRL have been facing some challenges getting their visa. Sandro, in particular, has been waiting more than 4 months already, and hasn't been able to arrive in February as planned. This is quite depressing. So, if you are coming soon, or one of your collaborators is, please make sure visa applications are started as early as possible.
PhD funding.
The CNRS is looking at funding three PhD students this year (standard French PhD scholarship for three years plus 5000EUR a year for International costs) to work mostly in France, but in partnership with an IRL. Partnership can mean a full "cotutelle" (joint PhD), a lighter co-supervision, or simply a long (like 3 months) visit to an IRL. The application form is attached. Sylvie and I will have to rank the applications, and we don't expect to receive funding for more than one students, but we are optimistic about getting one. If you have a project (and maybe a candidate) in mind, please send it through to Sylvie and me.
Master students visits.
As you can see here, we will already have two Master level students visiting this year. The IRL will be able to pay for their flights, but unfortunately not for anything else. We see this a bit like the FRT program at ANU, i.e. as a great way to build networks and reputation, and to find potential candidates for joint PhDs.
Talking about joint PhDs, keep in mind that you can convert (with some effort) an Australian PhD to a joint France-Australia one if you and your student are interested. This could be a great way to "keep" some of our top ANU students while giving them an excellent International experience.
Questions?
As always, if you have any question, just ask Sylvie or me. I won't respond in the next two weeks though, as I will be on leave around there:)
Cheers,
Pierre.