I am an Austrian-French mathematician and mathematical physicist. I was born in Berlin, Germany. My mother was from Finland and my father an Austrian citizen who left Austria a few days before the Anschluss. They met in France while studying French at the University; they married after the war in the lovely city of Saint Tropez on the French Riviera. I grew up in Berlin, and at the age of 6 I moved to France, first to Nice and then to Paris. I got my "Baccalaur�at" at the Lycee de Saint Cloud near Paris. I then went back to Nice to study mathematics; I got my PhD at the University of Nice in 1978 under the supervision of Jacques Chazarain. The University of Nice was in the 1970's a stronghold of the Bourbaki group. (See pp. 43-45 in the interview connes-interview.pdf of Alain Connes: I totally agree with his opinion about Bourbaki). I had teachers like J. Dieudonn�, L. Boutet de Monvel, A. Douady during my undergraduate studies; they succeeded in convincing me of the superiority of Poincaré on Hilbert... Some years later (1992) I obtained a "Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches" at the University of Paris 6 (more about that below) under the mentorship of Jean Leray. See the genealogy project  http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=38471

 I am married with Charlyne since 1970 (we met in Nice) and we have four children, Serge (a Swedish mathematician), Corinne (an English language teacher in France), Samantha (a photographer in Los Angeles), and Sven (a student and computer specialist). If you want to see what they all look like you can go to my personal homepage  www.freewebs.com/mauricedegosson (but this site very much under construction due to lack of time!)

If you click the following link

http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=featauth/-author=417/0305-4470/8

you will read an online interview of me by the Institute of Physics author services; it is about my work around 2005 in mathematical physics (more specifically the Schr�dinger equation in phase space ).

Some of my hobbies: epistemological and ontological questions in quantum mechanics. Dining out and enjoying good company.

You can  contact me using the following email address: mauricedegossonmath@gmail.com .

I strongly believe in the absence of barriers between "pure" and "applied" mathematics and in the encouragement of links between them. Interdisciplinarity has led to the greatest achievements in Science: Isaac Newton and Henri Poincaré are only two examples, among the brightest. We are fortunately witnessing a return of these ideals which had been somewhat forgotten during part of the past century. Here is one of my favorite quotations (it is due to Bertrand Russell in "The Study of Mathematics".

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."

My main areas of interest and research are:

• Harmonic analysis in symplectic spaces, including partial differential equations (pseudo-differential calculus and microlocal analysis) and applications to time-frequency analysis;
• Symplectic geometry and topology (symplectic and Lagrangian path intersection indices: Maslov index, Conley-Zehnder index, etc...) and their relations with the theory of the metaplectic group;
• Mathematical physics, especially quantum mechanics and its semi-classical formulations; "dequantization".
• The interplay between time-freequency analysis (also called Gabor analysis) and phase-space quantum mechanics.

About symplectic geometry:

 Symplectic geometry has deep roots in mathematics and physics going back to Huygens' study of optics and the Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of mechanics. It has grown to touch virtually all branches of mathematics, including many parts of dynamical systems, representation theory, combinatorics, packing problems, algebraic geometry, and differential topology.

About mathematical physics:

"Mathematical physics spans every subfield of physics. Its aim is to apply the most powerful mathematical techniques available to the formulation and solution of physical problems. Mathematics is the language of theoretical physics and, like other languages, it provides a means of organizing thought and expressing ideas in a precise consistent manner. Physicists who are articulate in the language of mathematics have made the greatest contributions to the modern formulations of physics. The list is long and includes such names as Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Weyl, Wigner and Dirac." (David Rowe, author of Chapter 18 in the IUPAP Year 2000 book: http://www.iupap.org/)

I enjoy writing and assembling mathematical material into a coherent package, so a lot of my effort has gone into writing books concurrently with research papers; it is fun to write books and you learn lots from doing it! See my Research page for details.

During the summer session 2003 I gave a special "FIRST FACULTY IN RESIDENCE" course on some of these topics at the University of Colorado at Boulder; see  http://amath.colorado.edu/courses/4720/2003Sum/

Doctorat de 3. Cycle:  Université de Nice-Sofia Antipolis, 1978. Supervisor: J. Chazarain (Nice). Title of thesis: "Hypoellipticité partielle à la frontière des opérateurs pseudo-différentiels de transmission".

My supervisor was Jacques Chazarain, at that time a leading specialist in partial differential equations (he now works in artificial intelligence). The subject of my thesis was a microlocal study of the transmission property for pseudo-differential opeartors, with applications to partial hypoellipticity. I later extended this work in a series of articles; in particular I succeded in defining a notion of "boundary wavefront set", which behaved well under the action of pseudo-differential operators with the transmission property

Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches: Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), 1992. My mentor was Jean Leray (Collège de France), one of the great mathematicians of last century. Did you know that Leray invented sheaf theory and spectral sequences while being a prisoner of war in Austria during WWII? See Haynes Miller's text in Gaz. Math. No. 84 (2000), 17-34 "Leray in Oflag XVIIA http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson/LerayOflag.ps.

The "Habilitation" is a very high-level French diploma which is necessary for applying for a professorship in France; it replaces the former Doctorat d'État. I was Leray's last student; his mentorship was actually unofficial since he was at that time over 85 years old: the French motto was (and still is!) place aux jeunes! My Habilitation thesis consisted of a series of papers, on partial differential equations and on a topological and combinatorial study of the Maslov index, with applications to the theory of the metaplectic group.

• Conference in the Honour of Jean Leray, Karlskrona 1999. Here is a link to Springer Online where you can find  the Proceedings: http:///www.springeronline.com/
• Aspects of Symplectic Analysis, Karlskrona 2000: see http://mmf.ruc.dk/~Booss/SymplecticAnalysis.html
• Baltic Sea Seminar, Karlskrona 2000 (I cretaed this cycle of conferences which takes place every two or three years in countries bordering the Baltic sea) 
• Workshop on Symplectic Geometry (with Syie Wu and Carla Farsi), Boulder 2001
• Conference on PDE's and Mathematical Physics, Karlskrona 2002
• Mathematics and War, Karlskrona 2002: see http://mmf.ruc.dk/~booss/mathwar/index0813.htm . Here is a nice Italian site detailing the aims of this conference: http://matematica.uni-bocconi.it/matematica-guerra/home.htm

More about these conferences on http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson/organizationofconferences.htm