Archive for École Normale Supérieure
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
André ou Jean Ville (1910-1989)
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags 25w5482, Abraham Wald, Alain Trognon, André Ville, Andrey Markov, École Normale Supérieure, Berlin, Bernard Bru, BIRS-CMI, Bull computers, Chennai, Edmond Malinvaud, Emile Borel, George Darmois, Glenn Shafer, history of Monte Carlo, history of statistics, India, Jean Ville, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Popper, Kurt Gödel, martingales, Maurice Fréchet, minimax strategy, Monte Carlo methods, Paris, Paul Lévy, plane crash, Richard von Mises, signal theory, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne, supermartingale, two-player game, Université de Paris, Vienna, Ville's inequality, Wolfgang Doeblin, WW II on August 12, 2025 by xi'an
Throughover the workshop in Chennai floated (!) the figure of Jean/André Ville, with his inequality generalising Markov’s, who invented martingales. He is not such a well-known figure in France—at least to me!—, despite having led a rather exceptional life, from being a visiting scholar in Berlin (in the Maison académique de Berlin, along with a certain Jean-Paul Sartre) and Vienna in the 1930s, to his wife being (in Berlin) one of the many (disposable and despised) lovers of JP Sartre (to whom an open-minded or clueless Ville later sent his thèse d’université on martingales and collectives, a much more substantial piece of work than the current PhD), to him working with German and Austrian mathematicians and logicians, such as Popper, Gödel, and Wald–who, what a coïncidence!, died in India from a plane crash in 1950 that had left from Chennai–and being impressed enough by the latter to passing an economics degree in the Sorbonne when back in Paris, establishing a minimax result for a zero-sum matrix game with two players, to his counter-example to von Mises’ kollectiv, to his nickname of the King of Counterexamples in the Viennese mathematics seminar, to him operating the first (Bull) computer at the Université de Paris. (Glenn Shafer wrote a detailed accounting of his youth, on which this post is based, up to his thesis defence but a few days from France mobilising for war–where his collegue Wolfgang Doeblin would kill himself the year after, to avoid capture–. With Bernard Bru, Edmond Malinvaud and Alain Trognon among the people who helped.) After the war, he worked several years as a prépa maths teacher before working for a French State electricity companion on signal theory and Monte Carlo methods, and then returning to Université de Paris as a professor in 1957.
Fondation Sciences mathématiques de Paris scholarships for math masters [2025-2026]
Posted in Kids, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags École Normale Supérieure, Fondation des Sciences Mathématiques de Paris, France, FSMP, INRIA, Master program, Paris, PGSM, PhD scholarship, PSL Research University, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris Nanterre on November 22, 2024 by xi'an
machine learning à l’Académie, au Collège, et dans Le Monde
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Académie des Sciences, École Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, data science, Guillaume Budé, neural network, Paris, Stéphane Mallat, wavelets on January 5, 2018 by xi'an
A back-cover story in Le Monde “Sciences & Médecine” of Stéphane Mallat, professor at École Normale and recently elected at the (French) Academy of Sciences and at the Collège de France, on a newly created Chair of Data Sciences. With works on wavelets, image compression, and neural networks, Stéphane Mallat will give his first lesson on Data Sciences at Collège de France, downtown Paris, on January 11. Entrance is free and open to everyone. (Collège de France is a unique institution, created by Guillaume Budé and supported by François Ier in 1530 to teach topics not taught (then) at the Sorbonne, as indicated by its motto Docet Omnia, including mathematics! Professors are nominated by the current faculty and the closest to statistics, prior to Stéphane Mallat, was Edmond Malinvaud.)
BimPressioNs [BNP11]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags École Normale Supérieure, Bayesian nonparametrics, BNP11, empirical likelihood, French cheese, Hamiltonian, IHP, Noel Cressie, NPR, Paris on June 29, 2017 by xi'an
While my participation to BNP 11 has so far been more at the janitor level [although not gaining George Casella’s reputation on NPR!] than at the scientific one, since we had decided in favour of the least expensive and unstaffed option for coffee breaks, to keep the registration fees at a minimum [although I would have gladly gone all the way to removing all coffee breaks!, if only because such breaks produce much garbage], I had fairly good chats at the second poster session, in particular around empirical likelihoods and HMC for discrete parameters, the first one based on the general Cressie-Read formulation and the second around the recently arXived paper of Nishimura et al., which I wanted to read. Plus many other good chats full stop, around terrific cheese platters!
This morning, the coffee breaks were much more under control and I managed to enjoy [and chair] the entire session on empirical likelihood, with absolutely fantastic talks from Nils Hjort and Art Owen (the third speaker having gone AWOL, possibly a direct consequence of Trump’s travel ban).
