Created in 1918, the Ligue contre le cancer is an association under the French law of 1901 and is recognised as being of public utility. The Ligue is the leading non-governmental funder of cancer research. the Ligue funds and supports the best research teams, leading to important advances in treatment and quality of life for patients, and is also instrumental in refining screening techniques and protecting populations from known or emerging risk factors.
The Labex CEMPI (Centre Européen pour les Mathématiques, la Physique et leurs Interactions) is a project of the Laboratoire de Mathématiques Paul Painlevé (LPP) and the Laboratoire de Physique des Lasers, Atomes et Molécules (PhLAM).
The overall ambition of CEMPI is to create innovative concepts, theories and devices to tackle and disentangle the complexity of the world around us. Specifically, but not exhaustively, it aims to: work on the structure of wave turbulence in optical fibres; focus on problems in biology and ecology using probabilistic or statistical approaches; model how the liver synchronizes to meal timing; build quantum and photonic simulations of outstanding condensed matter problems with unparalleled flexibility; harness the complex dynamics of electron bunches in synchrotrons to boost the major light source facilities around the world; design innovative optical fibres for high-speed internet communications; exploit linear dynamical systems to solve problems in ergodic theory; investigate quantum topology and its connections with representation theory; study the local structure of Coulomb gases; improve machine learning's mathematical foundation using random matrix theory; work on important conjectures concerning laminations and foliations; focus on arithmetic study of curves, of coverings and of their moduli spaces; design efficient numerical methods, robust with respect to model parameters.
Those challenges lie indeed within the domains in which CEMPI researchers have established international leadership and are currently pushing the state of the art. In these problems, fundamental questions interact with high-priority societal challenges of the French and European research strategies, such as multiplying the bandwidth of internet links to match ever increasing communication needs, developing smart algorithms to analyse massive datasets or deciphering the role of the biological clock in obesity and type 2 diabetes.