[Posted on june 25, 2017.]
Some observations on the newly elected members of Assemblée Nationale:
- an incredible amount of younger députés, indeed there are 28 under 30 (to be compared with, respectively, 1, 0, 0, 0 in the previous 5-year législatures) and 100 under 40 (again to be compared with 17, 11, 11, 16 previously) ; this is set to now be the norm since a new law to be voted soon will cap at 3 the number of terms as député for any citizen (thus inducing a permanent renewal process, moreover many of the over-40 are into their third or more term and many will probably be replaced in 2022 by younger folks)
- a much better amount of women: 224 out of 577, to be compared with the previous figures of 151, 109, 76, 54. And since most députés that won’t be able to have more terms in 2022 are men, there’s a good chance of achieving parity then.
- also, those who just won their first term include a very substantial amount of members of civil society, in particular academics and teachers (using this wikipedia list), among whom an Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT, a Professor of Genetics & Biotechnology at Nîmes, a Rwanda-born 27 years old Economist, a 25- year-old high school math teacher, a Fields medalist, a former lecturer in Fluid Mechanics, a Lecturer in Chemistry & VP at Saint-Etienne, and a 37-year-old Neurologist at a Grenoble Hospital.
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In other news:
- Jean-Pierre Kahane passed away at 90
- Peter Scholze, who has recently been elected to the Leopoldina, has a recent preprint titled Étale cohomology of diamonds which is not yet on the arXiv.
- a 10-year-old in Cameroon who enjoys math is nearing the end of the high school curriculum there, hopefully he’ll then get the University-level education he deserves (and surely he’s not the only one)
- I’ve updated my list of Diamond OA journals in mathematics to include Acta Mathematica and Arkiv för Matematik
- a strange editor’s note in the current issue of Annals of Mathematics, whereby they withdraw a 2001 paper without saying why, and it appears that the paper was never cited in the 16 ensuing years (at least according to google scholar), which is very odd.[update: see this story on Retraction Watch (h/t anon)]
Paris, France by Bob Hall on flickr
episodic thoughts 