Jean Cerf


Jean Cerf is a French mathematician, specializing in topology.

Education and career

Jean Cerf studied at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in sciences in 1947. After passing his agrégation in mathematics in 1950, he obtained a doctorate with thesis supervised by Henri Cartan. Cerf became a maître de conférences at the University of Lille and was later appointed a professor at the University of Paris XI. He was also a director of research at CNRS.
Cerf's research deals with differential topology, cobordism, and symplectic topology. In 1966 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Moscow. In 1968 Cerf proved that every orientation-preserving diffeomorphism of 3-sphere| is isotopic to the identity. In 1970 Cerf proved the pseudo-isotopy theory for simply connected manifolds. In 1970 he was awarded the prix Servant, together with Bernard Malgrange and André Néron. 1971 he was the president of the Société Mathématique de France.

Selected publications