Laurent C. Siebenmann

Laurent Siebenmann at the IHÉS, 2007

Laurent Carl Siebenmann (the first name is sometimes spelled Laurence or Larry) (born in 1939 in Toronto) is a Canadian mathematician based at the Université de Paris-Sud at Orsay, France.

After working for several years as a Professor at Orsay he became a Directeur de Recherches in the French CNRS in 1976. He is a topologist who works on manifolds and who co-discovered the Kirby–Siebenmann class. His undergraduate studies were at the University of Toronto. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University under the supervision of John Milnor in 1965 with the dissertation The Obstruction to Finding a Boundary for an Open Manifold of Dimension Greater than Five. His doctoral students at Orsay included Michel Boileau, Francis Bonahon, Albert Fathi, Lucien Guillou, Alexis Marin and Jean-Pierre Otal.

In 1985 he was awarded the Jeffery–Williams Prize by the Canadian Mathematical Society. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected publications

• Kirby, Robion C.; Siebenmann, Laurence C. (1977), Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations (PDF), Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr., ISBN 0-691-08191-3

External links

• Kirby and the promised land of topological manifolds: memories and memorable arguments; a talk by Siebenmann
• Photos
• Home page
• Laurent C. Siebenmann at the Mathematics Genealogy Project