Olav Arnfinn Laudal - Mathematics

Professor Olav Arnfinn Laudal is one of the greatest Norwegian mathematicians of his generation. He has made a major contribution to developing mathematical research in Norway through the number and quality of his students (he has supervised more than 60 doctoral theses) and the extensive international network he has established.

George M. Bergman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsIt is significant that Prof. Laudal's first stay abroad was in France, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he completed his studies at a time when Alexander Grothedieck's exuberant ideas were setting the mathematical world on fire, not only in France but throughout the world. Here, he met many of the people with whom he would continue to interact and collaborate throughout his career. 
He was one of the first Western mathematicians to come into contact with Soviet mathematicians, and in this way, he established contacts that were to develop and expand. During all these years he made many research visits to France and gave many lectures in Paris, Strasbourg, Caen, etc., and especially in Angers where he stayed several times, invited as a visiting professor (in 1990-91) giving lectures in mathematics, as a researcher several times (in the 1990s) organising a working group on Massey triple products in 1997, and to participate in the Franco-Norwegian Day in Non-commutative Algebraic Geometry in 2011. And he has often brought students with him to strengthen these bonds, as in the case of his Norwegian PhD student who spent three months at LAREMA. His last visit to Angers was during the symposium held in his honour from 11 to 13 July 2016, where he gave a "mini-course" on mathematical physics. 

He is a leading mathematician whose work in non-commutative algebraic geometry, along the lines of that of Fields Medal winner Alain Connes, is remarkable and unmissable. In recent years he has created a mathematical model of the world based on the deformation (in the mathematical sense) of a point, which makes it possible to calculate all the laws of modern physics. 

Prof. Laudal is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and headed the committee that created the Abel Prize (the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize), the first recipient of which was the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Serre. 

The University of Angers awarded Professor Olav Arnfinn Laudal the Doctor Honoris Causa title on December 3, 2019