Claire Voisin interviewed in Nature

Mathematics gets rarely featured in Nature, as this is not the most obvious outlet for mathematical discoveries, hence it is exceptional to see Claire Voisin interviewed in the 08 Feb issue, following her receiving the 2024 Crafoord Prize in Mathematics and Astronomy “for outstanding contributions to complex and algebraic geometry, including Hodge theory, algebraic cycles, and hyperkähler geometry”. She is actually the very first female mathematician to received this prize, although she states this has no particular significance for her.

“In French schools at the time, there was the fashion of ‘modern mathematics’, which was an attempt to teach abstract mathematics, such as set theory. We had to do completely crazy things, like compute the development of numbers in base 2.”

The above statement puzzled me as, given that I am the same age as Claire Voisin, I do not remember doing `modern mathematics’ in high school but rather in primary school, with exposure to sets theory and functions, incl. injectivity and surjectivity, and indeed to different bases, which I found quite fun (rather than crazy) at the time. She also mentioned that, while in preparatory school, she was more interested in philosophy than mathematics, which was almost the case for me as well, in that I would have switched from the maths+physics program there to a program mixing philosophy and maths, had it existed at the time.

data science in La X

As the [catholic] daily La X has a special “Sciences&éthique” report on data science and scientists, my mom [a long time subscriber] mailed me [by post] the central pages where it appeared. The contents are not great, focusing as often on a few sentences from  and missing on the fundamental limitations of self-learning algorithms. As an aside, the leaflet contained a short interview by Jean-Stéphane Dhersin, who is head of the CNRS ModCov19 centralising platform [and anecdotally a neighbour] on the notion that a predictive model in epidemiology can be both scientific and imprecise.

lunch with David [and Meursault]

“My real beef, my real anger, is that hugely expensive programmes like test and trace did not have built in, right from the beginning, a capacity for experimental evaluation. They should have been running studies, different methodologies, different ways of tracing. As it is, we don’t know what benefit it’s had. It’s like rolling out vaccines without ever measuring whether they have an effect or not. For Heaven’s sake!”

another Nice shot [jatp]

MASH in Le Monde