Mathematician Florian Luca, member of the GANDA IRN, joins CNRS Fellow Ambassador Programme
Florian Luca, a mathematician at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has joined the "CNRS Fellow-Ambassador" programme established in 2023. Meet this specialist in number theory, heavily involved in international collaborations.
Hailing from Romania, Florian Luca earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996, and subsequently undertook various research stays abroad at Syracuse University (USA) and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (Czech Republic), before receiving a Humboldt scholarship at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). He then joined the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2000, before moving to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he has been working since 2014.
His research primarily focuses on number theory, particularly diophantine equations and arithmetic functions. A specialist in his field, he has co-authored over 500 research articles in mathematics and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2005 as a permanent resident of Latin America. Currently, his research is centred on the Skolem problem as well as transcendence criteria for automatic and similar words, topics of interest not only to mathematicians but also theoretical computer scientists.
What does this nomination mean to you?
I was very surprised to learn about it. I am, of course, very happy and honoured to receive such a nomination. For nearly 20 years, I have maintained a very good collaboration with France in general, and more specifically with Professor Yuri Bilu and his research group in Bordeaux.
Official cooperation began in 2004 as part of joint projects between ANUIES and CoNACyT on the Mexican side, where I was based at the time, and CNRS on the French side. For many years, I travelled to Bordeaux for short periods (a few weeks) or longer (up to three months) as part of various arrangements, ranging from one-month chairs to CNRS "red positions," and engaged in interesting research with this team. Specifically, 2 or 3 of these extended stays were part of the ALGANT program, a renowned international master's program of which Bordeaux is among the participants. I ended up co-authoring papers with several French doctoral students from the laboratory. Some of my Mexican and South African doctoral students were also invited to visit Bordeaux and wrote joint papers with French doctoral students. I am pleased to receive this nomination, which will allow me to continue my visits to Bordeaux over the next few years.
What do you expect from this nomination?
I am happy to continue visiting Bordeaux as we still have many ongoing projects. However, I know many other colleagues in France with whom I would like to have the opportunity to interact more. So, I plan to approach them in the near future and inquire about the possibility of visiting their laboratories for a few weeks at a time over the next three years, with the aim of identifying appropriate common research topics that could lead to interesting results in the future. As for the goals I hope to achieve, there are two different directions. On one hand, I would like to soon begin my annual one-month visits. The first visit will probably take place in September or October in Bordeaux, and I will communicate my exact dates to CNRS by July. On the other hand, in the coming years, I would like to organize visits to Paris, Nancy, and Marseille, where I have many colleagues with whom I would like to cooperate. On the African side, I would like to continue receiving visits from French colleagues or teams to give lectures and collaborate with my colleagues and our students. If there is interest on the French side, I would like to serve as an "ambassador" and ask my university to allow CNRS to open an office at Wits, which CNRS researchers could use to visit us more often.
Florian Luca thus has strong ties to the French mathematical community, a position reinforced by his appointment as a Fellow Ambassador. His collaboration with Yuri Bilu, a professor at the Bordeaux Institute of Mathematics1 , has led him to become involved in the GANDA IRN, an international mathematical collaboration network composed of members working in France, South Africa, Denmark, and Madagascar.
- 1Bordeaux INP/CNRS/Université de Bordeaux
What is the GANDA IRN?
GANDA, for Geometry and Arithmetic, is an International Research Network (IRN) funded by CNRS and its partners. Born out of the many existing collaborations between South Africa and the University of Bordeaux, it now brings together mathematicians from France, South Africa, Denmark, and Madagascar. The network is led by Fabien Pazuki, a professor at the Copenhagen Institute of Mathematics, and Yuri Bilu, a professor at the Bordeaux Institute of Mathematics. Since its creation in 2018, the GANDA IRN has been a great success: following conferences held in South Africa, several collaborations between researchers from the different countries involved have emerged. While the original partner was Stellenbosch University, the network has since expanded to include Wits University and the University of Antananarivo, broadening its research themes to related subjects to keep up with the scientific evolution of the country. Both structuring and exploratory, the GANDA IRN supports numerous collaboration projects, whether long-term or for shorter periods, while including PhD and sometimes Master's students during events to sustain this exchange dynamic in the future.