Category Archives: Mathematicians

Annales de la Faculte des Sciences de Toulouse is a peer-reviewed international  journal with a long tradition of excellence (going back to 1887 and Thomas Stieltjes). The journal periodically publishes surveys by the recipients of the Fermat Prize.  The Editorial Board encourages … Continue reading →

The 2014 Fields medals were awarded to Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, Martin Hairer and Maryam Mirzakhani. Their works are shortly described in the IMU announcement. Artur Avila main contributions are in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. Manjul Bhargava’s are in … Continue reading →

This is with deep sadness that I learnt that my former Phd advisor Marc Yor passed away on Thursday, January 9. I remember him as an extraordinary kind and gentle person with an unlimited amount of patience and energy for … Continue reading →

I would like to point out to the website: Eugene Dynkin Collection of mathematics interviews. It is an unvaluable source of informations full of anecdotes about several influential contemporary mathematicians. I particularly enjoyed the interview by Joseph Doob where he … Continue reading →

John Milnor is a renowned mathematician who made fundamental contributions to differential topology and was awarded the Fields medal in 1962. One of his most fundamental discoveries is the existence of several distinct differentiable structures on the 7 dimensional sphere. … Continue reading →

An interesting look into the life and career of Richard Courant:

A few days ago, I was told the following problem: Let E a finite set of points in the plane with the property that any line containing two points of E contains at least a third one. Show that E … Continue reading →

Cedric Villani is an extremely well-known mathematician in France, who was awarded the Fields medal in 2009. The following video shows well his personality and explains a little his conception about the work of mathematicians. As he points out, mathematics … Continue reading →

It is not always clear how to write a mathematics paper but it is much more clear how not to write it ! This funny video by Jean-Pierre Serre shows some of the things one should avoid.    

Richard Feynman was obviously an extraordinary physicist and a charismatic lecturer. In the following video he discusses the differences and the interplay between mathematics and physics: His opening statement is: “Mathematicians only are dealing with the structure of the reasoning.” … Continue reading →