Centre International de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées

Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh Prize

Proclamation of results

 Avner Bar-Hen, President of the « Société Française de Statistique »,
 Maria Esteban, President of the « Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles »,
 Stéphane Jaffard, President of the « Société Mathématique de France »

Are pleased to announce that the Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh Prize for 2009 is awarded to

It will enable him to visit INRIA in Rennes in the framework of his PhD.

The Ibni Prize has been created by the French Mathematical Societies in the memory of Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh to continue his commitment to quality training of young African mathematicians.

The Prize "Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh" is awarded to a student of an institution of Central Africa or West Africa, in mathematics or statistics, at the graduate or post-graduate level, to benefit from a scientific training in a country other than his/her own.

The winner is selected after review by a scientific committee appointed by CIMPA/ICPAM (International Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics). The prize has been funded by a subscription.

For more information on Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, the circumstances of his abduction, and the prize itself, please consult http://smf.emath.fr/SouscriptionSaleh/

The French Mathematical Societies have received 10 applications, including 8 eligible, from Benin, Cameroon and Niger, with plans to go to Scotland, Spain, France, Morocco, Senegal.

The choice was made by a scientific committee whose composition, determined by CIMPA was as follows.
 Susanne Brenner (Louisiana State University, USA)
 Toka Diagana (Howard University, USA)
 Youssef Ouknine (FSSM, Maroc)
 Ragni Piene (Université d’Oslo, Norvège)
 Tsou Sheung Tsun (Université d’Oxford,United Kingdom)
 Enrique Zuazua, (Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, Espagne), Chair.

The selection committee chose as winner Oumarou Abdou Arbi.

Oumarou Abdou Ali is from Niger. He has studied at the University of Abdou Moumouni in Niamey and received his MS degree in 2007. He has been a part time teacher in a secondary school since 2003. He completed an internship of 6 months at INRIA during the year 2009. He had the opportunity to give a talk at INRA.

His science project is entitled : "Use of metabolic networks in nutrition”. It lies at the interface between mathematics and computer science, in a multidisciplinary approach. Here is an excerpt from his application, in which he describes the context of his work :

The theory of metabolic networks is an important field of systems biology. It involves analyzing all metabolic fluxes used by an organization (cell. ..). Mathematically, the problem reduces to the study of all solutions of a system of affine equations. This set of solutions is typically very large (under-constrained system), and different optimization methods may be used to describe the geometry as a simplex.

Oumarou Abdou Ali hopes to do a PhD in bioinformatics at the end of the internship that the Ibni Prize will enable him to make.