The 46 -year -old scientist, who gives his inaugural lesson to the Collège de France on November 10, is often considered unclassifiable by his peers for the eclecticism of his work.
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“I have never spent so much time for an hour of presentation! And I still have to prune,” sighs with Irony Nalini Annantharaman, who has just received the key from his professor office at the Collège de France, where she will pronounce his inaugural lesson by one hour Thursday, November 10.
This stress may seem surprising in this 46 -year -old mathematician, very experienced in teaching. Lecture teacher at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon at the end of his thesis in 2001, professor at the University of Orsay eight years later, then at the University of Strasbourg in 2014, she also gave some courses to The Polytechnic School.
Orléanaise, born of parents professors at university, in math for her mother, in computer science for her father of Indian origin, she has fun in the Parisian district of her youth where she studied in prep to Louis-le-Grand, then to the École normale supérieure: “I have the impression of returning to the past.” A return only intermittent because, for family reasons, she will continue to live in Strasbourg.
nalini annantharaman is not the type to put down his suitcases, figuratively. In twenty years of career, she has already attacked four or five different subjects. To the point of being quite unclassifiable. “Even in conferences, we do not know where to put myself! I am often perceived as an outsider, which forces me to adapt my presentations to the audience,” she confirms. It has already touched the probabilities, geometry, chaos, dynamic systems (the study of equations that evolve in time), equations with partial derivatives (equations also evolving in space), graphs (graphs ( Objects with nodes and edges such as a social network or the web), varieties (synonymous with surfaces) and even random surfaces (domain that is not fifteen years old) … We surely forget.
For a craftsman, it would be to go from cabinetmaking to knitting then to pottery and sculpture. “I don’t like compartmentalized things. I love to explore new tracks and discover things that I don’t know,” she sums up, confessing having often trained on the job. “It’s courageous, because having to train in other themes can be scary. But it brings freshness. When I was her thesis student, I appreciated that she offers to get started on paths new ones “, testifies Laura Monk, in post-doc at the University of Bristol after having been the doctoral student of Nalini Annantharaman until 2021.
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