Archive for Collège de France
the symposium is cancelled
Posted in Books, pictures, University life with tags British history, censorship, Centre arabe de recherches et d'études politiques de Paris, Collège de France, Europe, French history, French Ministry of Higher Education Research and Innovation, French politics, Gaza, Gaza war, history, Israel, Israeli bombardments, Palestine, symposium on December 8, 2025 by xi'an
Stéphane Mallat awarded CNRS Gold Medal
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags 1530, Académie des Sciences, awards, École Normale Supérieure, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS, CNRS Gold Medal, Collège de France, France, neural networks and learning machines, Paris, signal processing, Stéphane Mallat, wavelets on September 12, 2025 by xi'an
Borel and Langevin jailed [in 1941]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Abwehr, Académie des Sciences, anti-fascism, Camille Marbo, collaboration, Collège de France, Emile Borel, French Navy, French resistance, IHP, Institut Henri Poincaré, Jacques Solomon, Lucien Le Cam, Nazi occupation, Paul Langevin, Pétain, Vichy régime, WW II on December 1, 2024 by xi'an
When attending the Le Cam 100th anniversary day at IHP, I learned from Laurent Mazliak’s talk that Émile Borel Borel (then in his 70’s and a member of the French Académie des Sciences) was arrested and jailed for a few weeks in 1941, as well as Paul Langevin (both in 1940 and 1941), for political (left-wing) reasons (?), by German security services (Abwehr), with no involvement of the French collaborationist authorities who rather intervened towards their release (along with the German Navy!, unlikely connected with Borel being the minister of the French Navy in 1924!!). Possibly from denunciations sent to German forces. Possibly as a show of power by the occupying forces towards the Vichy government and Philippe Pétain. The fact that Borel and his wife, Camille Marbo, were actually engaged in the French Resistance at least from 1942 fortunately did not come to the knowledge of French police or German security. (Langevin was one of the founders of the 1934 Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes. In 1941, his son-in-law, Jacques Solomon, a physicist, got arrested and executed for founding a clandestine newspaper, l’Université libre. His daughter Hélène Solomon-Langevin got deported but survived several deportation camps.)
a journal of the chaos, conquest, war, [far from] famine, and death year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Running, Travel with tags A Sun, anti-immigrant mob, Argentan, book review, Buddhism, calamare, Collège de France, comedy, comparative literature, COVID-19, dahl, Daniel Defoe, death penalty, Don Quixote, fennel, film review, Florida, Florida Keys, France Inter, gangster movie, gochugaru, Journal of the Plague Year, kimchi, mafia, Netflix, New Orleans, orecchiette, Paris, Russian invasion, Taiwan, William Marx on August 3, 2024 by xi'an
Read nothing new for a while as I got stuck finishing Babel at a sloth pace… But bought for the summer vacations Don Quixote de la Mancha (in French) and a commentary by Marx that I intend to use as a reading guide. Not The Marx, mind you!, but a professor of comparative literature at Collège de France who gave a guided reading of the masterpiece on the French public radio last summer…. (I gave up carrying the extra abridged Spanish version I bought in Oaxaca eons ago. And already carried for nothing on earlier vacations.) Still, went through a few BDs suggested by and borrowed from Andrew, like De Cape et De Mots, a nice take over Cinderella, Overseas Highway, a none-too-credible Florida-set mafia scenario with great drawings, and Une simple formalité, set in New Orleans with anti-Italian mobs overcoming the corrupted police, and further themes of my liking (as predicted by Andrew!).
Had one cooking marathon a Saturday aft (in the sense it lasted longer than my estimated time for a marathon!) when making new kimchi with cabbage, carrots, and turnips (and of course a large serving of powder gochugaru), matcha rice pudding, grilled peppers, rhubarb preserve, marinated calamare all at once! With markets approaching peek season in terms of offer of local vegetables, I also made plenty of dahls and pasta dishes, like the above panned fennel orecchiette serving.
Watched The Pig, The Snake and the Pigeon, a dark comedy around Taiwanese gangster movies, with the funny premise that the central character is “only” the third most wanted gangster in the country, hence wants to eliminate the first and second ones to achieve posthumous fame. There is not much more in terms of story lines, but loads of (unrealistic) action, and great characters. Not at the level of A Sun, by far, but enjoyable. I found out later that the title refers to a Buddhist tale about the three poisons: the “pig” corresponds to #3’s ignorance and obsession, “snake” to #2’s violence and hatred, and “pigeon” to #1’s greed.
[Warning: There will be a series of Journals posted in the coming days, as I wrote several in the past months, only to forget them in the draft section!]
lecturing in Collège
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags 1530, ABC, Collège de France, Docet omnia, France, La Sorbone, Leuven, Louvain, Marguerite de Navarre, Master program, Paris, Rabelais, random sampling, Statistical learning, Université de Paris on March 28, 2024 by xi'an
A few weeks ago I gave a seminar on ABC (and its asymptotics) in the beautiful amphitheatre Marguerite de Navarre (a writer, a thinker, and a protector of writers like Rabelais and of reformist catholics, as well as th sister of the Collège founder, François I) of Collège de France, as complement of the lecture of that week by Stéphane Mallat, who is teaching this year on Learning and random sampling. In this lecture, Stéphane introduced Metropolis-Hastings as one can guess from the blackboards above! The amphitheatre was quite full since master students from several Parisian universities are following the course, along the “general public” since the first principle of the courses delivered at Collège de France is that they are open to everyone, free of charge and without preliminary registration! (As a countermeasure to the monopoly of the university of Paris, following the earlier example of the 1518 trilingual college of Louvain). Here are the slides I partly covered in the lecture.
