Marie Duflo

Marie Duflo (19 August 1940 – 15 September 2019) was a French probability theorist,[1][2] and left-wing internationalist activist, known for her books on probability theory and random processes and on Nicaraguan politics.

Education and career

Duflo was an alumna of the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, promoted in 1959,[3] and completed a doctorate (Doctorat d'État) at the University of Paris in 1969, with the dissertation Opérateurs potentiels des chaînes et des processus de Markov irréductibles supervised by Jacques Neveu.[4] She became a professor at Université Paris-Nord and the University of Marne-la-Vallée.[2]

Activism

Duflo was active in French left-wing circles concerning Latin America. In 1968, she attended a Cultural Congress in Havana with several other French mathematicians.[5] In the 1980s, she took over the responsibility for Central American affairs in the French Socialist Party when Nicole Bourdillat stepped up to head Latin American affairs more generally for the party,[6] and later under Louis Le Pensec she became the head of Latin American affairs for the party herself.[7]

By 2006, when she signed an open letter in support of undocumented students in France, she had retired from Marne-la-Vallée as a professor emerita.[8] She spent her retirement as an activist for the rights of foreigners in France, and a 2020 paper on the legal treatment of noncitizens in overseas France was dedicated in her memory.[9]

Books

Her books include:

  • Décisions statistiques pas à pas [Statistical decisions step by step] (with Danielle Florens-Zmirou, CIMPA, 1981)[10]
  • Probabilités et statistiques (two volumes, with Didier Dacunha-Castelle, Masson, 1982; also published with two separate volumes of exercises; translated into English by David McHale as Probability and statistics, Springer, 1986)[11]
  • Le volcan nicaraguayen [The Nicaraguan Volcano] (edited with Françoise Ruellan, La découverte, 1985)[12]
  • Méthodes récursives aléatoires (Masson, 1990, revised and translated into English by Stephen S. Wilson as Random iterative models, Springer, 1997)[13]
  • Algorithmes stochastiques [Stochastic algorithms] (Springer, 1996)[14]

References

  1. Birthdate from idRef authority control record, accessed 2021-10-29
  2. Décès de Marie Duflo (in French), French Mathematical Society, 17 September 2019, retrieved 2021-10-29
  3. "Marie Duflo", L'annuaire (in French), Association des anciens élèves, élèves et amis de l'école normale supérieure, retrieved 2021-10-30
  4. Marie Duflo at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. Marcellán, Francisco; Martínez-Finkelshtein, Andrei (2010), "Guillermo López Lagomasino: mathematical life", Recent trends in orthogonal polynomials and approximation theory, Contemp. Math., vol. 507, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, pp. 1–24, doi:10.1090/conm/507/09953, MR 2647563; see p. 5
  6. Taracena Arriola, Arturo (2021), "Solidarity and diplomatic work of the Guatemalan revolutionary movement in Europe: the case of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor)", in Harmer, Tanya; Martín Alvarez, Alberto (eds.), Toward a Global History of Latin America's Revolutionary Left, University of Florida Press, pp. 227–252; see p. 234, "Nicole Bourdillat, the person responsible at the time for Central America in the Socialist Party (she would later be in charge of all Latin America, with the mathematician Marie Duflo covering Central America)"
  7. Mujal-León, Eusebio (1989), European Socialism and the Conflict in Central America, Praeger, p. 61, ISBN 9780275932398
  8. Étudiants étrangers : ni sélection, ni expulsions !, Réseau universités sans frontières, June 2006
  9. Benoît, Catherine (November 2019), "Fortress Europe's far-flung borderlands: 'Illegality' and the 'deportation regime' in France's Caribbean and Indian Ocean territories", Mobilities, 15 (2): 220–240, doi:10.1080/17450101.2019.1678909, S2CID 214045100
  10. Review of Décisions statistiques pas à pas: B. van Cutsem, Zbl 0585.62133
  11. Reviews of Probabilités et statistiques and Probability and statistics: V. K. Rohatgi, MR0680578; L. Weiss, Zbl 0535.62004; J. Anděl, Zbl 0586.62003, Zbl 0586.62004
  12. Review of Le volcan nicaraguayen: Marie-Thérèse Texeraud, Politique étrangère, JSTOR 42671988
  13. Reviews of Méthodes récursives aléatoires and Random iterative models: Brian Conolly, MR1082344; R. Theodorescu, Zbl 0703.62084; T. N. Pham, Zbl 0868.62069; Persi Diaconis, J. Amer. Stat. Assoc., doi:10.2307/2669576, JSTOR 2669576
  14. Reviews of Algorithmes stochastiques: Michel Benaïm, MR1612815; C.Mazza, Zbl 0882.60001
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