Dimitri Leemans Explained

Dimitri Leemans is a Belgian mathematician born in Uccle in 1972.

Biography

Leemans obtained his Licence en Sciences Mathématiques at the Université libre de Bruxelles in 1994 and his doctorate degree, under the supervision of Francis Buekenhout and Michel Dehon in 1998.^[1]

He is currently Professor at the mathematics department of the Faculty of Sciences of the Université libre de Bruxelles.^[2] He lived five years in New Zealand from 2011 until 2016 where he worked for the University of Auckland as an Associate Professor. He returned to Belgium after experiencing problems with Immigration New Zealand because of his stepson's autism.^[3]

Prizes and awards

• Agathon De Potter prize for the period 2000-2002 from the Academie Royale des Sciences de Belgique^[4]
• 2007 Annual Prize in Mathematics from the Academie Royale des Sciences de Belgique^[5]
• 2013-2016 Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand^[6]
• New Zealand Mathematical Society 2014 Research Award^[7]
• 2018 Francois Deruyts Prize in Geometry from the Academie Royale des Sciences de Belgique

Research

Leemans's principal area of research is at the interface of algebra, computational mathematics, combinatorics and geometry. He has made major contributions in the study of regular and chiral polytopes whose automorphism groups are finite almost simple groups. He has published more than 90 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and two memoirs of the Academie Royale des Sciences de Belgique.^[8] He is the developer of the Magma (computer algebra system) package on incidence geometry and coset geometry since 1999.^[9]

External links

• Personal website of Dimitri Leemans

Notes and References

1. https://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Record/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/212051/Holdings "Classification of RWPRI geometries for the Suzuki simple groups"
2. https://www2.ulb.ac.be/facs/sciences/math/departement.html "Website of the Mathematics Department"
3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/prestigious-academic-to-quit-new-zealand-after-autistic-son-refused-residency "Prestigious academic to quit New Zealand after son refused residency"
4. Proclamation des Prix de Concours annuels 2003 et des Prix de Fondations académiques,Bulletins de l'Académie Royale de Belgique 2003, page 405.
5. F. Buekenhout and S. Gutt, Groupe I: Mathématiques. Residually Weakly Primitive and Locally Two-transitive Geometries for Sporadic Groups par Dimitri Leemans. Rapports des Commissaires,Bulletins de l'Académie Royale de Belgique 2007, pp. 395-397
6. https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-awards-2012/ "Marsden grant awards 2012"
7. http://nzmathsoc.org.nz/?awards "Awards and Prizes"
8. https://difusion.ulb.ac.be/vufind/Search/Home?lookfor=Dimitri+Leemans&sort=pubdate+desc&submitButton=Recherche&type=person "Research papers of Dimitri Leemans"
9. http://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/magma/acknowledge/ "Acknowledgements"