The adhesive tapes are still lying around here and there. In the middle of the “fractal” models, these mathematical patterns with a psychedelic air intertwined with each other that we find on Romanesco cabbages and hippie clothes. Near a map, dense like that of Paris, where disciplines like topology, analysis, or algebra connect. Behind a giant guitar string, so large that you can see the vibrations propagating from end to end when you strum it.
Under construction since 2016, the Jean-Perrin building of the Institut Henri-Poincaré (IHP), a center of scientific research located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, is preparing to become the first French museum dedicated to mathematics. New York already has its MoMath, Germany, Das Mathematikum. France will have its Maison Poincaré. Emmanuel Macron himself saw to it. So, a few days before the opening, scheduled for September 30, the workers screw, tap, rub, fine-tune, and the guides repeat.
In the past, Einstein, Broglie, Borel wandered under these bricks, whitewashed these green paintings. The nation’s most brilliant scientists gathered there to calculate the trajectories of Nazi bombs. Jean Perrin had proven the existence of the atom there in the last century, before giving his name to the building. A horde of children, teachers and parents will soon pass in front of his bust at the entrance, and will pull, nest and click on the different games and educational tools spread over 900 square meters.
The French love to hate them
With a mixed reality room as its flagship workshop, the initiative wants to revive interest in the queen of sciences, which the French love to hate. “Some people even boast of not being good!” regrets Sylvie Benzoni, president of the Henri-Poincaré Institute and project manager. We want to contribute, on our scale, to raising the level and encouraging vocations, by making this place a meeting place, where we can see, listen, touch math, and thus understand its richness and diversity.”
The researcher, a specialist in partial derivatives, was keen to highlight as many men as women – a show is dedicated to the careers of female mathematicians. In a room, benches and period woodwork, clips are projected. Researchers talk about their pleasure in solving a problem. Susanna Zimmermann’s eyes shine. This scientist, 2020 CNRS bronze medalist, came to the rehearsals to discover her testimony. She takes a photo of herself to mark the occasion.
A leader in algebraic geometry, the art of studying shapes, curves, areas that certain equations outline, the thirty-year-old evokes in her video portrait the strength that one must have as a woman, in a masculine environment. More than 93% of mathematics professors at universities and 81% of lecturers are men, according to a fact sheet from the Ministry of Higher Education, published in September 2021. Where parity is progressing in society in general, she is going backwards in this discipline.
Mathematics has suffered from recent procrastination in education policy. In 2019, the Minister of National Education at the time, Jean-Michel Blanquer, made them optional. A disaster for girls and children from working-class neighborhoods. In 2021, only 46% of future high school graduates studied mathematics in addition to the common core, compared to 67% for their male classmates, according to an information note from the ministry dated June 2022. A similar development was observed among the most disadvantaged.
How to talk about mathematics?
Faced with this trend, mathematics has once again become compulsory in first grade. Alongside these structural changes, initiatives are flourishing to improve their image. The year 2023 has notably been designated the year of “promotion of mathematics at school”. But how can we go about it, beyond remembering that there are a slew of genius female mathematicians, and that girls are just as adept at math as boys, contrary to the sexist prejudices of the last century?
The question was the subject of long discussions before the opening of the museum: “We tried to avoid reinforcing the observation, by hammering home the statistics, or by creating a room reserved for female successes. It’s fatalistic” , details Véronique Slovacek-Chauveau, honorary president of Women and Mathematics, an association hosted at the IHP, invited to the discussions. “We must also avoid highlighting only inaccessible profiles, otherwise we reinforce the idea that it is unattainable,” continues Sylvie Benzoni.
A heroine, who remains accessible… This is what director Anna Novion chose to represent, in Marguerite’s Theorem, a feature film which retraces the journey of a normalienne, which will be released in theaters in November 2023. The film delves into the intimacy of research: the doubts, the revelations, the encounters. Those who help, those who must be fought against. “With a leading role as a female mathematician, we move to a completely different scale than classroom interventions,” rejoices Ariane Mézard, teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and scientific advisor for the film.
During filming in the rooms and courtyard of the Parisian school – a stone’s throw from the math museum – Ariane Mézard ensures, in addition to the accuracy of the equations, to break the myth of genius, which frightens many. “Marguerite, she works! Like an athlete or an artist, she trains, repeats. It’s not innate, even less a boy’s thing”, defends the mathematician, specialist in the geometry of p-adic numbers, world mathematics that arises from prime numbers.
“Embody, show weaknesses”
“The key is to tell, to embody, to show the weaknesses, the errors”, estimates Hervé Pajot, professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes, scientific consultant for a series of comics on the figures of the discipline. The second episode is dedicated to Sophie Germain, a 19th century mathematician, forced to write under a pseudonym. In these works, formulas, personal lives and historical stories mix. We come across the Algerian War, Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, the Shoah. So many beacon calls to literary people. Still many of them largely stay away from math.
Denis Van Waerebeke, for his part, focused on complexity. “Reducing the Fibonacci sequence to a pine cone is understandable but it may seem ridiculous. We can harpoon with the fascinating side,” assumes this director, at the origin of Journeys to the land of math, a popular series which achieves the feat of talking about the most difficult and abstract areas, in short capsules on the Arte YouTube channel. The videos show the philosophical, humanist and artistic immensity of certain concepts. And, like the math museum, or the comic strip The Audaces of Sophie Germainthe program breaks the idea of a loose, hermetic, isolated science.