Augustin Banyaga

Augustin Banyaga (b. March 31, 1947 in Kigali, Rwanda) is a Rwandan-born American mathematician whose research fields include symplectic topology and contact geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Biography

Banyaga earned his Ph.D. degree in 1976 at the University of Geneva, under the supervision of André Haefliger. He was member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1977-1978), Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University(1978-1982), and Assistant Professor at Boston University (1982-1984), before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 1984 as Associate Professor. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1992.

He has made significant contributions in symplectic topology, especially on the structure of groups of diffeomorphisms preserving a symplectic form (symplectomorphisms). One of his best-known results states that the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a compact, connected, symplectic manifold is a simple group; in particular, it does not admit any non-trivial homomorphism to the real line.

Banyaga is an editor of Afrika Matematica, the journal of the African Mathematical Union, and an editor of the African Journal of Mathematics. He has supervised the theses of 7 Ph.D. students.

References

Articles

* A. Banyaga, "Sur la structure du groupe des difféomorphismes qui préservent une forme symplectique", Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 53 (1978), no. 2, 174–227. MathSciNet|id=0490874
* A. Banyaga, "On fixed points of symplectic maps", Inventiones Mathematicae 56 (1980), no. 3, 215–229. MathSciNet|id=0561971
* A. Banyaga, "On Isomorphic Classical Diffeomorphism Groups. I.", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 98 (1986), no. 1, 113–118. [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9939%28198609%2998%3A1%3C113%3AOICDGI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G JSTOR] MathSciNet|id=0848887
* A. Banyaga, "On Isomorphic Classical Diffeomorphism Groups. II.", Journal of Differential Geometry 28 (1988), no. 1, 23–35. MathSciNet|id=0950553
* A. Banyaga, "A note on Weinstein's conjecture", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 123 (1995), no. 12, 3901–3906. [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9939%28199007%29109%3A3%3C855%3AANOWC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 JSTOR] MathSciNet|id=1021206

Books

*cite book
author= A. Banyaga
title=The Structure of Classical Diffeomorphism Groups
publisher= Kluwer Academic Publishers
year= 1997
isbn = 0-7923-4475-8
*cite book
author=A. Banyaga, D. Hurtubise
title=Lectures on Morse Homology
publisher= Kluwer Academic Publishers
year= 2004
isbn= 1-4020-2695-1

External links

*
* [http://www.math.psu.edu/banyaga/ Home page at PSU]
* [http://www.math.psu.edu/banyaga/banyaga2.pdf Vita]
* [http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/PEEPS/banyaga_augustin.html Augustin Banyaga] , at Mathematicians of the filipinong mga taNGA at bobo