Dear CRM colleagues, dear IRL colleagues,

My term of office as Director of the IRL (or UMI) is coming to an end after one more year, and Emmanuel Royer will take over from me on September 1. Emmanuel is a university professor at the Université Clermont-Auvergne, where he headed the mathematics laboratory (laboratoire de mathématiques Blaise Pascal) from 2024 to 2018, before becoming deputy scientific director of the Institut national des sciences mathématiques et de leurs interactions of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique from 2018 to 2023.
Since completing his thesis under the supervision of Étienne Fouvry and Philippe Michel in 2001, he has been working in number theory, with a particular interest in modular forms and related functions.

I’d like to thank everyone, and in particular the two directors of the CRM with whom I had the pleasure of working: Luc Vinet and Octave Cornea.

Luc Vinet was a great help to me in bringing to fruition the CNRS’s plans to create a mathematics-informatics IRL. He won the full support of the vice-rector of the Université de Montréal for the mathematicians of the CRM, so that two distinct entities would exist rather than one. His role was also crucial during the pandemic, keeping both the CRM and the IRL running smoothly. The research traditions of the mathematicians were validated for a resumption of activity, by authorizing the holding of worki