Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in Paris is a pure research institution not associated with any particular French university. There are no graduate students, just the illustrious permanent research staff including 3 Fields Medalists, plus a handful of French researchers including postdocs, and an assortment of international visitors of the highest caliber with stays of various lengths, which changes from year to year. The partnership with IHES allows for QGM to share in this annual bounty of international visitors, both postdoc and senior, with exchanges both from France to Denmark and from Denmark to France. Maxim Kontsevich is a famous leading figure in geometric aspects of mathematical physics and one of seven permanent professors at IHES. He received the Fields Medal for his achievements in 1998 as well as a steady stream of the top awards in mathematics and physics including most recently the 2012 Shaw Prize and the newly established three million dollar Fundamental Physics Prize. Among his many accomplishments: he used Robert C. Penner's cell decomposition of Riemann's moduli space to prove Witten's conjecture on the intersection numbers of tautological classes; he constructed the `Kontsevich' universal Vassiliev invariant, which is a universal perturbative invariant for links in 3-space related to the Reshetikhin/Turaev TQFT; he produced a deformation quantization of any Poisson manifold using A1-categories and formality; he formulated the homological mirror symmetry conjecture and gave its solution for elliptic curves; in more recent work with Soibelman, he has proved this conjecture for certain torus fibrations. His work with Soibelman has further let to what is now called his wall-crossing program, on which he gave a masterclass at the center in 2010. The Geometric Langlands Program on the moduli space of Higgs bundles is in fact a special instance of homological mirror symmetry, and Kontsevich has proposed a vast generalization of this program. All core researchers of the centre have had fruitful contact with him over the years. Kontsevich spoke at the inaugural symposium for QGM. The ongoing and deep involvement of Kontsevich with QGM has guaranteed beyond any doubt its elite status and has established a strong bond between IHES and Danish mathematics.
