Welcome to the home page of Thierry Vallée

Dr. Thierry Vallée


Assistant Professor
Dept. of Mathematical Sciences, P.O. Box 8093
Georgia Southern University
Statesboro, 30458 Georgia, US 
Email: tvallee@georgiasouthern.edu
Phone:  +  (912) 486 77 41



Curriculum Vitae

Publications and Pre-publications

Short academic CV

After a PhD thesis in Mathematical Logic and Foundations of Computer Science at the PPS laboratory in the Mathematics Department of the University Paris VII, I worked during 9 months as a postdoc for the department  of Mathematics and Computer Science  of the University of Udine. Then, I joined the Centre for Efficiency Oriented Langage directed by Michel schellekens from May 2003 to April 2007. I am presently Assistant Professor in Mathematics and Statistics at Georgia Southern University.

During my PhD, I had got a two years lectureship position as an ATER in Mathematics and Computer Science. My lectures took place in the GEA department of the IUT of the University Clermont1 , and my research  at the LLAIC, a laboratory of the same university.


Scientifics interests

My scientific interests cover a broad spectrum:

- Foundation of mathematics, including lambda-calculus theories and their models
- Graph Theory and its applications
- Semantics of programming languages
- Logic
- Time Analysis of algorithms

The three last subjects are intimately linked in the MOQA project developed in my current laboratory  CEOL . MOQA is a programming language (formerly called ACETT) which was especially designed by Michel Schellekens to facilitate the average time analysis of its programs. In particular, I am working on a model of the basic operations of MOQA. This model would allow a better understanding of the fundamental property of MOQA's operations, called "Random Bag Preservation". The general aim of this model is then to help us to find new Random Structure Preservation operations. In  a middle term run, I would like to explore the different logic and typing techniques used to control the complexity of programs, and try to apply them to the average time analysis. 

In parallel to my work on average complexity, I am developing a cooperation on Graph Theory and its applications with the Universities of Caen and St. Etienne.  We are studying links between graphs, topologies and groups.  In particular, G-graphs, a certain kind of graphs induced from groups introduced by Pr. Alain Bretto and strongly linked to Cayley graphs, have applications in network design and cryptography. 

PhD thesis:  

Title: "Map Theory" et Antifondation, defended on 21 December 2001 and published as ENTCS Vol.79

My thesis was about a foundational theory of type-free lambda-calculus due to Klaus Grue and called Map Theory. The original version of MT is a "well-founded" one. It includes an induction scheme allowing to define functions, and an induction principle for reasoning about these functions. It was proved by Grue to be at least as powerful as ZFC+Well-Foundation.
Motivated by the development of coinductive methods of definition and reasoning in computer science, I designed an "antifounded" version MTA of MT which I proved to be at least as powerfull as ZFC+AFA, where AFA is the Aczel-Honsell-Forti's antifoundation axiom. We proved the relative consistency of this new version in the framework of the kappa-continuous semantics of lambda-calculus, which is a generalization of Scott's (omega-)continuous semantics to any regular cardinal kappa.

Postdoc in Udine

I worked on a non-well-founded theory of classes due to De Giorgi  and its embedding in MTA. In particular, I attempted to build a model of the theory plus a problematic axiom inside a model of MTA. The question of the existence of such a model is still open.