François Thilmany

Owl — Ansgar, one of the great horned owls of UCSD.

I am currently an FWO postdoc at the KU Leuven, under the supervision of Gábor Szabó.

Previously, I was a postdoc in the team of Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace, and before that, a graduate student at UCSD.
My PhD advisor was Alireza Salehi Golsefidy.

Contact

Departement Wiskunde
Celestijnenlaan 200B
3001 Leuven (Heverlee)
België

francois.thilmany(at)kuleuven(dot)be

Research

With Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace and Geoffrey Janssens, Center-preserving irreducible representations of finite groups (on arXiv)
With Geoffrey Janssens and Doryan Temmerman, Simultaneous ping-pong for finite subgroups of reductive groups (on arXiv)
Prasad's volume formula and its applications
With Amir Mohammadi and Alireza Salehi Golsefidy, Diameter of homogeneous spaces: an effective account (on arXiv, in Math. Ann.)
With Marston Conder, Alex Lubotzky and Jeroen Schillewaert, Constructing highly regular expanders from hyperbolic Coxeter groups (on arXiv, in Trans. AMS)
With Lam Pham, Arithmetic groups and the Lehmer conjecture (on arXiv, in Isr. J. Math.)
Lattices of minimal covolume in SL(n,R) (Mathematica file, class numbers script, on arXiv, in Proc. LMS)

Activities

Belgian reading seminar on representation theory (Spring 2026)
Belgian reading seminar on group cohomology (Spring 2025)
KUL–UCL reading seminar on non-commutative ergodic theory (Spring 2023)
UGent–UCL reading group on Hecke algebras and Kazhdan–Lusztig theory (2023)

Teaching

Student seminar in mathematics (2025-2026)
Past links