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.

Quotes

• "I have done a lot of work on the history of mathematicians living in the first half of twentieth century. I edited correspondence between André Weil and Henri Cartan. I have also written about the way the Jews were forbidden to publish in France during the German occupation. I found some correspondence between two mathematicians at the time of the occupation. One was French, a collaborationist, and the other one German, a member of the army. In their letters, they were very friendly and exchanged very pro-Nazi opinions. I hoped to publish this correspondence, but then I realized the family would never give permission.Even now, not everybody in France is willing to publicize the fact that he or she had relatives who, seventy-five years ago, collaborated with the Germans. This is one thing that led me to write the novel. When you say, “So-and-so was French and became a German collaborator,” or “this was a bad guy, and that was a good guy”—you are just making an accusation. That was quite the opposite of what I wanted to do. I wanted to have a different kind of freedom, to write something that was not academic research. I wanted to have something more—how to do I say this (very modestly!)?—something more universal. I wanted to write in a different way from a standard paper in history or mathematics and to reach different kinds of readers. Of course, the main reason was that I wanted to write a novel,".
• "It was a very natural process. When I would write mathematics, I always tried to take care to write well. I am not the kind of mathematician who uses only fifty words of vocabulary! I just like to write, and I am happy to write about mathematics or mathematicians or anything else. Fiction writing is not very different from writing mathematics. It uses the same qualities, such as imagination and rigor."
• "No. Under President Hollande, the archives have been opened. But I don’t think there is anything in the archives, because this was something done secretly by the army. And it was sixty years ago"
• "I have a book that appeared in 2016, called Mademoiselle Haas. There were so many men in 121 Days that I decided to write a book about women! Mademoiselle Haas is about women working in Paris in the 1930s. None of them are mathematicians—at that time there were very few women mathematicians. And I have another book that will appear in September this year, about the Paris Commune in 1871. It has nothing to do with mathematics, although there are some mathematicians in it."
• "The thing I wanted to show is that numbers are exactly like words. Everybody knows that you can make words say whatever you want them to say. Numbers are the same. I wanted to say that there is nothing objective, no truth in numbers. There is a quotation of Simone de Beauvoir: “There are words as murderous as gas chambers.” After the liberation of France, there was a trial of a journalist who was a collaborator. He wrote many things against Jews, including giving addresses where people were hiding. These were just words. But there are words that are murderous. It’s just the same with numbers."
  • Michèle Audin, Mathematician and Writer, August 2017,Interviewed by Allyn Jackson