Emmanuel Giroux (born 1961) is a blind French geometer known for his research on contact geometry and open book decompositions.[1][2]
Giroux has Marfan syndrome, because of which he became blind at the age of 11.[1][2] He earned a doctorate from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 1991 under the supervision of François Laudenbach.[3]
He has been the director of the Unit of Mathematics, Pure and Applied (UMPA) at the École normale supérieure de Lyon.[2][4] In 2015, he left Lyon to co-direct the Unité Mixte International of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.[5]
Giroux is known for finding a correspondence (the eponymous Giroux correspondence[6]) between contact structures on three-dimensional manifolds and open book decompositions of those manifolds. This result allows contact geometry to be studied using the tools of low-dimensional topology. It has been called a breakthrough by other mathematicians.[7]
In 2002 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.[8]