Michèle Audin

Michèle Audin (Algiers, 3 January, 1954) is a French mathematician, writer, and a former professor. She has worked as a professor at the University of Geneva, the University of Paris-Saclay and most recently at the University of Strasbourg, where she performed research notably in the area of symplectic geometry.[1][2][3]

Michèle Audin
Michèle Audin in 2016
Born (1954-01-03) 3 January 1954
Algiers (French Algeria)
NationalityFrench
Alma materUniversité Paris-Sud
AwardsPrix Ève Delacroix (2013)
Scientific career
FieldsSymplectic geometry
InstitutionsUniversité de Strasbourg
ThesisCobordismes d'immersions lagrangiennes et legendriennes (1986)
Doctoral advisorFrançois Latour

Biography

Michéle Audin is the daughter of mathematician Maurice Audin and mathematics teacher Josette Audin, both pied-noirs and political activists for the independence of Algeria.[4] While she was a child, her father died under torture in June 1957 in Algeria, after being arrested by General Jacques Massu's paratroopers.[5]

She studied at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (now merged into the École Normale Supérieure but at the time a separate institution) and then she earned a Ph.D. degree in 1986 from the University of Paris-Saclay, with a thesis written under the supervision of François Latour, entitled Cobordismes d'immersions lagrangiennes et legendriens [Cobordisms of Lagrangian and Legendrian immersions].[6]

She then became a professor at the Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) of the Université de Strasbourg from 1987 until her early retirement in 2014.[7] She was president of the association Femmes et mathématiques in 1990 and 1991.[8]

In 2009 she refused to receive the Legion of Honour, on the grounds that the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had refused to respond to a letter written by her mother regarding the disappearance of her father.[9] Finally in September 2018, French president Emmanuel Macron admitted that Maurice Audin was tortured to death and apologized on behalf of France.[10][11][12]

In 2013 she was awarded the Prix Ève Delacroix for her novel Une vie brève.[13]

Research

Michèle Audin's research work mainly belongs to the field of symplectic geometry. Her PhD thesis draws on René Thom's theory of cobordism[14] to contribute to the founding program of symplectic topology launched by the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold. Audin then oriented her research to dynamical aspects, and more specifically to Hamiltonian systems.

In her monograph "Spinning tops: A Course on Integrable Systems", Audin discusses in detail the question of whether a dynamical system is integrable, a central question of her later research. A particularly enlightening example comes from her article "Sur la réduction symplectique appliquée à la non-intégrabilité du problème du satellite".

Audin's work on Kovalevskaya top led her to write another book, both mathematical, historical and more personal on this mathematician: "Souvenirs sur Sofia Kovalevskaya". She also published the correspondence (1928-1991) of two members of the Bourbaki group, the mathematicians Henri Cartan and André Weil, she wrote the first biography of the mathematician Jacques Feldbau, and she documented the genesis of the modern holomorphic dynamics, with detailed portraits of the main protagonists: Pierre Fatou, Gaston Julia and Paul Montel.

She contributes regularly on historical subjects to the mathematics popularisation website Images des mathématiques.[15]

As a writer

Alongside her activity as a mathematician, Audin leads an intense literary activity on her own and, since 2009, within the Oulipo.[16]

History of the Paris Commune

Passionate about the insurrection of the Paris Commune of 1871, Audin has written five books on this topic to document its history as well as its memory: two novels published by Gallimard, Comme une rivière bleue (2017)[17] and Josée Meunier, 19 rue des Juifs (2021), as well as three historical books published by Libertalia. The first, Eugène Varlin, bookbinding worker 1839-1871 (2019), is an anthology of the various writings of Eugène Varlin, some of which have not been published since their original release.[18] The second, C'est la nuit surtout que le combat devient furieux (2020), publishes the correspondence between Alix Payen, an unknown paramedic, and her Fourierist family, during the few months of the Parisian insurrection.[19] The last, La Semaine sanglante: Mai 1871. Légendes et comptes (2021), proposes a new counting of the deaths of Bloody Week, going up to “certainly 15,000 dead”.

Activity within the Oulipo

Audin was guest of honor at a meeting of Oulipo on the initiative of Jacques Roubaud, following the publication of her book Souvenirs sur Sofia Kovalevskaya, which mixes in a discontinuous form anecdotes, precise mathematics, testimonials, excerpts of correspondence with commentary and even literary pastiches. There are references to the Oulipo in testimonial chapters entitled “Je me souviens” in reference to Georges Perec, or even in a pastiche of Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.[20]

She became part of Oulipo in 2009, as the first member to be both a mathematician and a writer. Mathematics is for her both a source of inspiration for the constraints she invents and a recurring theme in her literary work. For example, in her novel La formule de Stokes, the heroine is a mathematical formula.[21]

She invented constraints of a geometric nature such as Pascal's or Désargues' constraint. Pascal's constraint was experienced in her online story Mai Quai Conti[22] which evokes the history of the Académie des sciences during the Paris Commune: the relationships between the characters of the story are determined by the position of the points of a geometric figure illustrating Pascal's theorem.[20]

She also worked with Ian Monk on nonine, i.e. a variant of the sestina based on numbers which are not Queneau numbers, and therefore with which the system of permutation of the sestina does not work.[23]

Her first novel, Cent vingt et un jours, is based on an onzine, i.e. a quenine of order 11 (variant of the sestina) from which characters, literary references and other elements of the narrative permute in a regulated manner. As in the poetic sestina, the last word of a chapter is the same as the first word of the next chapter.[20]

Publications

Literature
  • (in French) La formule de Stokes, roman, Cassini, 2016.
  • (in French) Mademoiselle Haas, Gallimard, 2016.
  • (in French) Cent vingt et un jours, Gallimard, 2014. Translated into English by Christiana Hills as One Hundred Twenty-One Days, Deep Vellum, 2016.
  • (in French) Une vie brève, Gallimard, 2013.

History of Mathematics
  • (in French) Correspondance entre Henri Cartan et André Weil (1928-1991), Documents Mathématiques 6, Société Mathématique de France, 2011.
  • (in French) Une histoire de Jacques Feldbau, Société mathématique de France, collection T, 2010.
  • (in French) Fatou, Julia, Montel, le Grand Prix des sciences mathématiques de 1918, et après, Springer, 2009
  • (in French) Souvenirs sur Sofia Kovalevskaya, Calvage et Mounet, 2008.

Mathematics
  • (in French) Géométrie, EDP-Sciences, 2005.
  • Hamiltonian systems and their integrability, Translated from the 2001 French original by Anna Pierrehumbert. Translation edited by Donald Babbitt. SMF/AMS Texts and Monographs, vol. 15. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI; Société mathématique de France, Paris, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8218-4413-7, MR2440371
  • The topology of torus actions on symplectic manifolds, Progress in Mathematics, vol. 93, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 1991. ISBN 3-7643-2602-6, MR1106194

References
  1. "Michèle AUDIN". Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  2. Jackson, Allyn (2017). "Michèle Audin, Mathematician and Writer" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. American Mathematical Society. 64 (7): 761–762. doi:10.1090/noti1545.
  3. Etchecopar, Philippe (2015-08-18). "Michèle Audin, mathématicienne (1954-)" [Michèle Audin, mathematician (1954-)]. Femmes Savantes, Femmes de Science (in Canadian French).
  4. Simon, Catherine (2013-01-10). "Michèle Audin, géomètre du souvenir" [Michèle Audin, geometer of memories]. Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  5. Béguin, François (2012-12-17). "Affaire Maurice Audin : "L'ouverture des archives est avant tout symbolique"" [Affaire Maurice Audin: "The opening of the archives is above all symbolic"]. Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  6. "Michèle Audin". Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  7. Audin, Michèle (2014-02-25). "Gagner moins pour travailler plus" [Earn less to travel more]. CNRS (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  8. "Instances – Femmes et Mathématiques" (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  9. Plenel, Edwy (2009-01-02). "La lettre de Michèle Audin à Nicolas Sarkozy" [The letter of Michèle Audin to Nicolas Sarkozy]. Mediapart (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  10. Chrisafis, Angelique (2018-09-13). "France admits systematic torture during Algeria war for first time". the Guardian. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  11. Nossiter, Adam (2018-09-13). "French Soldiers Tortured Algerians, Macron Admits 6 Decades Later". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  12. Cirri, Massimo (2018-09-14). "Morte di un matematico francese" [Death of a French mathematician]. Il Post (in Italian).
  13. "Michèle AUDIN". Académie française. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  14. Thom, Réné (1954). "Quelques propriétés globales des variétés différentiables" [Some global properties of differentiable manifolds]. Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici (in French). 28: 17–86. doi:10.1007/BF02566923. ISSN 0010-2571. S2CID 120243638.
  15. "Images des mathématiques". CNRS. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  16. "Michèle Audin". Oulipo (in French). 2013-07-23. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  17. Perraud, Antoine (2017-12-07). "« Comme une rivière bleue », cause commune" [“Like a blue river”, common cause]. La Croix (in French). ISSN 0242-6056. Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  18. Dejean, Mathieu (2019-05-23). "Pourquoi il est important de se souvenir d'Eugène Varlin, militant ouvrier et communard" [Why it is important to remember Eugène Varlin, labour activist and communard]. Les Inrockuptibles (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  19. Bouyssy, Maïté (2020-08-12). "Aux grandes femmes la Commune reconnaissante" [To great women the grateful Commune]. En attendant Nadeau (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  20. Tahar, Virginie (2018). "Quand les mathématiques, l'histoire et la littérature s'emmêlent. Entretien avec Michèle Audin" [When mathematics, history and literature intertwine. Interview with Michèle Audin] (PDF). Formule: Revue des créations formelles (in French). 21: 349–362.
  21. Tahar, Virginie (2020). "Les oulipiennes sont-elles des oulipiens comme les autres?" [Are female Oulipians as the other Oulipians?] (PDF). In Trotot, Caroline; Delahaye, Claire; Mornat, Isabelle (eds.). Femmes à l'œuvre dans la construction des savoirs: paradoxes de la visibilité et de l'invisibilité [Women at work in the construction of knowledge: paradoxes of visibility and invisibility]. Savoirs en Texte (in French). Champs sur Marne: LISAA éditeur. pp. 215–232. ISBN 9782956648062.
  22. Audin, Michèle (2011-03-25). "Mai quai Conti". oulipo.net (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
  23. Audin, Michèle (2015-04-19). "Nombres de Queneau (ou non)" [Queneau numbers (or not)]. Oulipo (in French). Retrieved 2022-03-27.
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