Nous continuerons, Professeur.

“Nous continuerons, Professeur. Avec tous les instituteurs et professeurs de France, nous enseignerons l’histoire, ses gloires comme ses vicissitudes. Nous ferons découvrir la littérature, la musique, toutes les œuvres de l’âme et de l’esprit. Nous aimerons de toutes nos forces le débat, les arguments raisonnables, les persuasions aimables. Nous aimerons la science et ses controverses. Comme vous, nous cultiverons la tolérance. Comme vous, nous chercherons à comprendre, sans relâche, et à comprendre encore davantage cela qu’on voudrait éloigner de nous. Nous apprendrons l’humour, la distance. Nous rappellerons que nos libertés ne tiennent que par la fin de la haine et de la violence, par le respect de l’autre.”

Emmanuel Macron, 21 October 2020

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.)

À la Sorbonne

This morning, in Sorbonne,  I attended the opening ceremony for the 26th promotion of l’Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), as I had the incredible chance of being nominated a senior member of this French virtual institute this Spring and for the incoming five academic years. (I had been nominated once already, from 2010 to 2015.) This institute is virtual in that its members remain in their home university, with a comfortable grant that buys teaching off and provides research support. This morning ceremony was mostly attended by the new members and the main event was a talk by Jules Hoffmann, Medicine Nobel Prize in 2011, who gave a very engaging talk in immunity and his work on the characterisation of immunity, first on flies and then on humans. The setting was the Grand Ampithéâtre of the historical Sorbonne building, only used now for academic ceremonies such as this one. (And also rented for private events…)