Biography 

The mathematician Thomas Leistner, who specializes in differential geometry, earned a degree in Mathematics from Humboldt University of Berlin in 1999, followed by a PhD in Mathematics from the same university in 2003, with the highest honors (“summa cum laude”).

After holding several research and teaching positions in Germany and Australia, he is currently an associate professor at the University of Adelaide, where he previously served as a lecturer and a researcher funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC).

His work has earned him several prestigious research grants, including an ARC Future Fellowship and multiple ARC Discovery projects. With more than 35 scientific articles to his credit, he has also been invited to numerous international research institutes. His current research focuses on differential geometry, particularly holonomy theory, semi-Riemannian and conformal geometry, as well as homogeneous spaces, with potential applications in theoretical physics.

Collaboration with the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (UMPA)

Professor Thomas Leistner of the University of Adelaide is a recognized expert in differential geometry, particularly in Lorentzian conformal geometry, holonomy, and Cartan geometry. He has made significant contributions to fields related to rigid geometric structures and geometric PDEs, with applications in theoretical physics—specifically, the theory of gravity and quantum phenomena.

His collaboration with Abdelghani Zeghib (UMPA) focuses on a central conjecture in Lorentzian conformal geometry (the Lichnerowicz conjecture), with specific objectives that are already well advanced. Their approach combines complementary areas of expertise and aims at promising generalizations. His visit to ENS de Lyon would help consolidate this project and foster exchanges with theoretical physicists at our School, thereby broadening the scope of the geometry team’s research. T. Leistner is scheduled to give talks at seminars or mini-courses.

Major publications

• Federico Costanza, Michael Eastwood, Thomas Leistner, and Benjamin McMillan. A Calabi operator for Riemannian locally symmetric spaces. Amer. J. Math., in press. in press, accepted 23 Oct 2024, preprint at 10.48550/ARXIV.2112.00841.
• Thomas Leistner and Stuart Teisseire. Conformal transformations of Cahen-Wallach spaces. Ann. Inst. Fourier (Grenoble), in press, 10.5802/aif.3678.
• Anna Fino, Thomas Leistner, and Arman Taghavi-Chabert. Almost Robinson geometries. Lett. Math. Phys., 113(3):Paper No. 56, 103 pages, 2023.
• Thomas Leistner and Thomas Munn. Completeness of certain compact Lorentzian locally symmetric spaces. C. R. Math. Acad. Sci. Paris, 361:819{824, 2023.
• Dmitri Alekseevsky, Vicente Cortés, and Thomas Leistner. Geometry and holonomy of indecomposable cones. Rev. Mat. Iberoam., 39(3):1105{1141, 2023.