2017, Sinnou David

Born in Pondicherry (India), Sinnou David is a former student of École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and University Paris-Diderot (formerly known as Paris VII). For his doctoral studies, he joined the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (UPMC), worked under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Bertrand and defended his PhD in 1989. He then received his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in 1995, again at UPMC.

After a brief stance has a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Orsay, he joined the faculty of the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris in 1989 as a Maître de Conférences and then as a professor in 2006. He has been associated with IMSc since the early 80’s and to CMI since its foundation.

He has been the Deputy director of Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche (UMR7586, CNRS, UPMC, Paris-Diderot) and then deputy scientific director, INSMI CNRS, in charge of international affairs.

He has been invited in many institutions as a visiting professor, among them Basel, Torino, Pisa, Vienna for Europe, Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley, Princeton for the Americas and Chennai, Mumbai, Beijing, Hong-Kong, Tokyo for Asia.

He is specialized in diophantine geometry and among his main contributions, one can mention :

– in Baker’s theory, jointly with Prof. N. Hirata-Kohno, a full solution of a conjecture of S. Lang on values of rational functions of elliptic curves. This result is obtained by proving an optimal lower bound for linear forms in elliptic logarithms (in terms of the height of the hyperplane it defines on the tangent space). This result was later generalized to general commutative algebraic groups by Eric Gaudron in his PhD (under the supervision of M. Waldschmidt and S. David).

-in height theory, jointly with Patrice Philippon, a full solution on a generalized conjecture of Bogomolov on the height of subvarieties of semi-abelian group schemes, generalizing a partial result on split semi-abelian varieties by Antoine Chambert-Loir; the Bogomolov conjecture had been earlier proven in the toric case by S. Zhang, in its original form (for curves in their Jacobian) by E. Ullmo and for subvarieties of abelian varieties by S. Zhang.

-in height theory, jointly with Francesco Amoroso, an almost optimal solution of Lehmer’s problem in dimension at least two (the only previously known case being the dimension one). In the set up of abelian varieties admitting complex multiplications, this result is proven jointly with Marc Hindry.

-on the arithmetic of function fields, jointly with Laurent Denis, the first cases of quadratic independence of periods of Drinfel’d modules.