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.
Archive for WW II
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'annuclear disarmament now!
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags 06 August 1945, atomic bombing, CTBT, hibakusha, Hiroshima, IAEA, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Japan, Korea, Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, Nagasaki, NPT, nuclear disarmament, war crimes, WW II on August 6, 2025 by xi'an
a journal of the wars year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags 1665, A bomb, abalone, Air France, Amsterdam, aquafaba, Black Plague, book reviews, Bright, Brighton Rock, buckwheat, Calgary, chocolate mousse, COVID-19, cuisine, Daniel Defoe, Edward Teller, fantasy, gardening, Graham Greene, haenyeo, Haruki Murakami, Hiroshima, homegrown, Jeju Island, Journal of the Plague Year, killer robot, Los Alamos Research Laboratory, Lysefjord, magical realism, Nagasaki, Paris, Robert Oppenheimer, Russian invasion, Shoreham, Singapore, smuggling, solo sailing, South Korea, Ukraine, whey, WW II on July 18, 2025 by xi'an 
Read Patrick Dewdney’s La Maison des Veilleurs, the fourth volume in this fantastic fantasy series. Only to realise by the end that this was not the end! The setting is the same as in the previous volumes, which makes this one less exciting and prone to extended lazy episodes. The main character, Syffe, keeps puzzling about his destiny and culpability in past events, and it took me a while to get re-hooked, but this remains a remarkable creation. Hopefully soon to be completed! During my Singaporean trip, I also read Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings which is a short fantasy in the Murakami sense, a disrupting mixture of realism (and nostalgia of childhood days) and of unreal behaviours of the characters. The story revolves around mental and sexual aggressions of the main character as a pre-teen, from a paedophile teacher as well as an abusive mother and a transparent father. The story gradually turns away from any pretence to realism and the end is a wee bit of a disappointment. Still worth reading imho. As well as Graham Greene’s The Man Within, which I had not read before (during an episode of intense exploration of his work, following the discovery of The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock). This is one of the earliest Greene’s, and it does contain many hints and premises of the great books to come, with the themes of pursuit, guilt, salvation already there, but as such, the story is rather awkward and contrived, with unnatural dialogues, inner thoughts revolving in circles, and a complete lack of realism in the scenario. The style itself is definitely Greene’s, with beautiful descriptions of the landscape. (I wonder why the cover features the famous Preikestolen cliff on the Lysefjord rather than the more sedate Shoreham downs, where smuggling French alcohols makes sense!)
Made no cooking for an entire week but enjoyed the almost infinite variety of Singaporean cuisines, with some nice discoveries. If missing the chili crab session on two consecutive nights! (And, coïncidence!, sat next to the same passenger on both flights between Paris and Singapore. If not the same crew as it happened once between Amsterdam and Calgary.) Had a weekend to recover and make most of my “classics”, incl. the weekly whey buckwheat galettes. And missing once again to keep an aquafaba mousse mouss-y enough!
Watched one episode of When Life Gives You Tangerines, which features Jeju women (haenyeo) diving for abalone harvesting (which I tasted in Singapore, if not likely from Jeju). And (at last) Oppenheimer on my flight back, as a way to fight sleep towards resetting my internal clock. Which I mostly enjoyed, despite some awkwardness in the scenario and an old-fashioned way of flipping between different eras, with black and white episodes in case one does not notice. And a very poor treatment of female characters. The ghastly moments when the team celebrates the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima or when officials refuse to drop from the nuclear arm race are quite strong, especially these days. Among the MCMC originators, only Edward Teller is involved in the story, from his obsession with the H bomb to his testimony against Oppenheimer at the high of the McCarthy Red Scare… I also sped through Companion, a lame movie about support robots turning into killers that offers little in either thriller or comic perspectives. Possibly written by ChatGPT?!
Pegasus bridge half marathon [1:26:26, 114/5227, 1/109 M5M and first over 55]
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags 1000 years, bagpipes, Caen, Courir en Normandie, D Day, glider, Hoka One One, Les Courants de la Liberté, M5M, Malherbe, Normandie, Normandy, Pegasus bridge, road race, WW II on June 22, 2025 by xi'an
Tough race when compared with last year despite good weather conditions (if quite warm), and bagpipes at the start, maybe due to overtraining. I barely managed to keep my first position in the M5M category, by a mere 2s, not that I was aware of the threat to my crown! The briefly leased Hoka One One shoes did not particularly help this time (or maybe they did!). This was my last half marathon in the M5M category (if my first race on invitation) and I am thus glad I could end up on a winning note, if not on a podium since only scratch winners are rewarded that way. Hopefully, I will get re-invited for next year.
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.)
