Hélène Esnault (born 17 July 1953) is a French and German mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.

Born in Paris, Esnault earned her PhD in 1976 from the University of Paris VII. She wrote her dissertation on Singularites rationnelles et groupes algebriques (Rational singularities and algebraic groups) under the direction of Lê Dũng Tráng.^[1][2]

She did her habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1985, and pursued her studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Afterwards, she was a Heisenberg scholar of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.^[3]

She became the first Einstein Professor at Freie Universität Berlin in 2012, as head of the algebra and number theory research group, after working previously at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn, and at the University of Paris VII.^[4]

In 2007 Esnault was editor-in-chief and founder of the journal Algebra & Number Theory. From 1998 to 2010 she co-edited Mathematische Annalen; she has also served as editor of Acta Mathematica Vietnamica, Astérisque, Duke Mathematical Journal, and Mathematical Research Letters.

In 2001 she won the Prix Paul Doistau-Émile Blutet of the Académie des Sciences de Paris. In 2003, Esnault and Eckart Viehweg received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.^[3] In 2014 she was elected to the Academia Europaea^[5] and is a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities^[6] and the Europäische Akademie Nordrhein-Westfalen [de]. In 2019, she won the Cantor medal.^[7]

• Hélène Esnault in the German National Library catalogue
• Homepage
• Book: Hélène Esnault, Eckart Viehweg: "Lectures on Vanishing Theorems" (PDF, 1.3 MB)