On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Friends of IHES will celebrate its 25th Anniversary with an exclusive dinner at the Harvard Club of New York City under the High Patronage of Mr. Cédrik Fouriscot, Consul General of France in New York.

The evening will also be an occasion to pay special tribute to the late Jim Simons, whose visionary leadership helped establish the Institute’s U.S. endowment fund.

A keynote speech, entitled “Occam’s Razor and Machine Learning”, will be delivered by Gérard Ben Arous.

The evening will be led by Yuri Tschinkel.

Gérard Ben Arous is specialist of probability theory and its applications. He holds the Alexzandria Figueroa and Robert Penner Chair at IHES since 2023.
After studying at École normale supérieure, he received his master’s degree and his Ph.D. from the University of Paris VII. He then held several positions at École normale supérieure, at the University of Paris-Sud (Orsay), and at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where he founded the Bernoulli Center. He joined the Courant Institute in New York in 2002 and was its Director from 2011 to 2016. After founding the Center for Data Sciences at Courant, he helped build the Sciences at NYU Shanghai. He became Silver Professor of Mathematics at Courant in 2020.
Gérard Ben Arous is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the International Statistical Institute.

Yuri Tschinkel is a mathematician whose research is at the interface of algebraic geometry and number theory. Prior to joining the Simons Foundation in 2012, where he is currently the Executive Vice President and the Director of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Yuri Tschinkel was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University, the Gauss Chair of Mathematics at the University of Göttingen, and Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department at the Courant Institute, New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of Academia Europaea. A regular visitor to IHES, Yuri Tschinkel sat on the Board of Friends of IHES from 2009 to 2014 and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Institute.