Claire Voisin’s CNRS Gold Medal

Last week, I attended the award ceremony of the Gold Medal of the French Scientific Research Council, which may well be the most prestigious scientific award in the country. It was awarded this year to Claire Voisin who is a specialist in algebraic geometry.

While I ended up in the meeting by the chance occurrence of Jean-Michel Marin visiting me, it was an impressive event with great talks from Claire Voisin (with a poetic praise of the complex exponential) and the CRNS Head, Alain Fuchs, but also quite enjoyable and mostly a-political discourses from the two Ministers attending the ceremony, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Thierry Mandon, who both mixed quotes from classics with some appreciation of Claire Voisin’s work. Even if one may suspect that those discourses were not (completely) written by the speakers (even though Mandon went looking for a Zweig’s quote during the meeting and ended up reading it from his phone, which was clearly unrehearsed!), they were delivered with enough conviction to be, well, convincing!

The event took place in the Grand Amphithêatre de la Sorbonne, which looked much nicer in the evening than when I attended the IUF rentrée a few weeks ago. And the classic (19th) paintings on the walls of this part of La Sorbonne made the ensuing cocktail even more classy. (Not that we had any opportunity to mingle with the Ministers, who are most likely too risk-adverse to be drawn in potential debates on the status of [funding] French Academia and academics…)

An update: on the road to Normandy, to visit my mother, we listened to a one-hour interview of Claire Voisin on France Culture that was a very good layman introduction to the maths she works on. (In French only.)