The 2026 Journée Georges de Rham, held on Wednesday 3 June 2026, was a great success, bringing together a large audience for two outstanding lectures delivered by distinguished speakers.
We were honoured to welcome Prof Hong Wang (IHES & NYU) and Prof Emmanuel Candès (Stanford University), whose talks generated strong interest, lively discussions, and numerous questions from participants.
Prof. Hong Wang presented a lecture entitled Kakeya sets in R3. A Kakeya set is a compact subset of R^n that contains a unit line segment pointing in every direction. Kakeya set conjecture asserts that every Kakeya set has Minkowski and Hausdorff dimension n. We prove this conjecture in R^3 as a consequence of a more general statement about union of tubes. Joint work with Josh Zahl.
Prof. Emmanuel Candès delivered a talk entitled What Statistics and AI Offer Each Other? exploring how careful thinking about AI inputs and outputs can lead to more powerful and safer AI systems. Through a series of illuminating examples, he addressed questions such as training language models under cost constraints, the consequences of exhausting available data, the reliability of AI-guided clinical trials, quality control in AI-assisted workflows, and the growing role of AI-powered imputations as substitutes for costly or difficult-to-collect data.
The event attracted an excellent crowd and sparked many engaging exchanges with the speakers throughout the afternoon.
Replay of Prof Wang is available here
Replay of Prof Candès is available here
