Norman sunrise [jatp]

the story of Gertrud and Auguste Macé

The discussions about the links between early statistics and eugenism brought back to memory the tragic story of a German-Norman couple, friends of my grandparents, Gertrud(e) and Auguste Macé, whom I met in the mid 1980’s. Auguste Macé was a school friend of my grandmother, born near the harbour city of Granville, Manche and, like my grandparents,  a war orphan, son of a French conscript killed in combat during WW I. During WW II, when Nazi Germany promptly invaded France in the Spring of 1940, Auguste Macé was part of the millions of French conscripts captured by German troops and sent to a stalag, in North-Eastern Germany (Prussia), where he was made to work in farms missing their workforce conscripted to war. In one of these farms, he met Gertrud, daughter of the farm owners, they fell in love, and Gertrud eventually got pregnant. When her pregnancy was revealed, Auguste was sent to another POW camp. And, while Gertrud was able to give birth to a baby boy, she was dreadfully punished by the Nazis for it: as she had broken their racial purity laws, she was sterilised and prevented from having further children, presumably staying in her parents’ farm. At the end of WW II, Auguste was freed by Soviet troops and went searching for Gertrud. It took him around six months of traveling in the chaotic post-war Germany, but he eventually found both her and their son! They then went back to Auguste’s farm, in Normandy, where they spent the rest of their life, with further hardships like the neighbourhood hostility to a Franco-German couple, lost their young adult son in circumstances I cannot remember, and tragically ending their life together in a car accident in 1988, on a trip to Germany… [When remembering this couple, I have been searching on-line for more information about them but apart from finding the military card of Auguste’s father and Auguste’s 1988 death record by INSEE, I could not spot any link in birth or wedding certificates or in the 98 lists of WW II French POWs. Where I could not find my great-uncle, either.]

inside Bayeux cathedral [jatp]

14th of July in Bayeux

MiMo2020

On 26 and 27 March 2020, the maths department of the Université of Rouen, Normandy, France, organizes a (free) workshop on mixture distributions. With the following speakers

• • Christophe Biernacki  (Laboratoire Paul Painlevé, Univ. Lille 1 et INRIA)
  • Vincent Brault (Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Univ. Grenoble Alpes)
  • Gilles Celeux  (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay, Univ. Paris Sud et INRIA)
  • Elisabeth Gassiat  (Laboratoire de Mathématiques d’Orsay, Univ. Paris Sud)
  • Van Hà Hoang  (Laboratoire de Mathématique Raphaël Salem, Univ. Rouen Normandie)
  • Hajo Holzmann  (Philipps-University Marburg, Germany)
  • Dimitri Karlis  (Department of Statistics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
  • Trung Tin Nguyen (LMNO, Univ. Caen Normandie)
  • Andrea Rau  (Département de Génétique Animale, INRA, Jouy en Josas)
  • Pierre Vandekerkhove  (Laboratoire d’Analyse et de Mathématiques Appliquées, Univ. Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée)
  • Cinzia Viroli  (Department of Statistical Sciences, Universita di Bologna, Italia)

Unfortunately, since this is my former department, I will not be able to attend as I am taking part into the SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (UQ20), on the very same days. In a session on likelihood-free inference.