A mathematician through and through, Michel Rigo has always had a taste for the abstract side of mathematics. When he came to choose his studies, he almost chose computer science… but mathematics finally won him over. He finished his degree in mathematics at the University of Liège in June 1997, as well as passing his teaching certificate at the same time.

Michel Rigo then began a PhD under the direction of Professor Pierre Lecomte, in the domain of abstract numeral systems. He then became an assistant at the school of economics, management and social sciences (FEGSS) for a year, followed by the mathematics department. After defending his thesis in 2001, he was made head of research at the FNRS, a position he held for a year. After this first year, a position became available in the maths department, in his area of research: discrete mathematics. He was first appointed junior lecturer in 2003, then professor in 2006.

Today, his classes cover all the courses that deal with discrete mathematics: theory of graphs, calculability, theory of automatons, etc. In the end, Professor Rigo is working in the area of mathematics that is closed to computer science. “I have come back to my initial choice in my work as a researcher”.

Selection of publications

E. Duchêne, A. Fraenkel, R. Nowakowski, M. Rigo, Extensions and restrictions of wythoff's game preserving wythoff's sequence as set of P positions, to appear in J. Combinat. Theory Ser. A.

E. Duchêne , M. Rigo, Invariant games, Proceedings of WORDS 2009, Univ. of Salerno, 14-18 Sept. 2009

J. Bell, E. Charlier, A. Fraenkel, M. Rigo, A Decision Problem for Ultimately Periodic Sets in Non-standard Numeration Systems, to appear in Int. J. Algebra and Computation.

F. Durand, M. Rigo, Syndeticity and independent substitutions, Advances in Applied Math. 42 (2009), 1--22.

V. Berthé, M. Rigo, Odometers on regular languages, Theory Comput. Syst. 40 (2007), 1--31.