Archive for Radio France

salut, c’est Lenoir !

Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 25, 2024 by xi'an

The death of Claude Villers a few days ago, a mythical radio presenter, reminded me of Feedback, the fabulous rock and pop show of his accomplice Bernard Lenoir on France Inter, to which I listened most evenings while in high school then uni, with live concerts like Joy Division’s and my religiously taping my favourite groups on cassettes. Until it got terminated. He returned to the national public radio for Black Sessions / C’est Lenoir, with a memorable studio concert of The Cure in 2004. Chapeau, Lenoir!

Homeric [radio static]

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , , , , on December 3, 2022 by xi'an

Heard on the French national public radio, France Inter, this morning, in the When gods walked the Earth show, reporting about the story of Niobe as told to Priam by Achille at the end of Illiad (Song XXIV). (With the haunting Never gonna change as soundtrack.)

Cette scène a quelque chose d’homérique..

La déraisonnable efficacité des mathématiques

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2017 by xi'an

Although it went completely out of my mind, thanks to a rather heavy travel schedule, I gave last week a short interview about the notion of mathematical models, which got broadcast this week on France Culture, one of the French public radio channels. Within the daily La Méthode Scientifique show, which is a one-hour emission on scientific issues, always a [rare] pleasure to listen to. (Including the day they invited Claire Voisin.) The theme of the show that day was about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, with the [classical] questioning of whether it is an efficient tool towards solving scientific (and inference?) problems because the mathematical objects pre-existed their use or we are (pre-)conditioned to use mathematics to solve problems. I somewhat sounded like a dog in a game of skittles, but it was interesting to listen to the philosopher discussing my relativistic perspective [provided you understand French!]. And I appreciated very much the way Céline Loozen the journalist who interviewed me sorted the chaff from the wheat in the original interview to make me sound mostly coherent! (A coincidence: Jean-Michel Marin got interviewed this morning on France Inter, the major public radio, about the Grothendieck papers.)