Jean Cerf was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1928. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in sciences in 1947. After passing his agrégation in mathematics in 1950, he obtained a doctorate with thesis supervised by Henri Cartan. Cerf became a maître de conférences at the University of Lille and was later appointed a professor at the University of Paris XI. He was also a director of research at CNRS.^[1]

Cerf's research deals with differential topology, cobordism, and symplectic topology. In 1966 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Moscow.^[2] In 1968 Cerf proved that every orientation-preserving diffeomorphism of ${\displaystyle S^{3}}$  is isotopic to the identity.^[3] In 1970 Cerf proved the pseudo-isotopy theory for simply connected manifolds. In 1970 he was awarded the prix Servant, together with Bernard Malgrange and André Néron (for independent work). 1971 he was the president of the Société Mathématique de France.

• " Groupes d'automorphismes et groupes de difféomorphismes des variétés compactes de dimension 3." Bull. Soc. Math. France 87 (1959): 319–329.
• "Topologie de certains espaces de plongements." Bull. Soc. Math. France 89, no. 196 (1961): 227–380.
• "Théorèmes de fibration des espaces de plongements. Applications." Séminaire Henri Cartan 15 (1962): 1–13.
• "Travaux de Smale sur la structure des variétés." Seminaire Bourbaki 7 (1962): 113–128.
• "La nullité de Γ₄, généralisation du théorème de Schönflies pour S²." In Sur les difféomorphismes de la sphère de dimension trois (Γ4= O), pp. 1–10. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1968. doi:10.1007/BFb0060396
• "La stratification naturelle des espaces de fonctions différentiables réelles et le théoreme de la pseudo-isotopie." Publications Mathématiques de l'Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques 39, no. 1 (1970): 7–170. doi:10.1007/BF02684687