Clichés transmitted by professors of maths/physics undergraduates in France

The latest issue of Gazette des Mathématiciens, published by SMF, is out today.

Many interesting articles there, but I’d like to mention for now the one (pages 53 to 58) by Arnaud Pierrel, a PhD student in Sociology, who writes in the Parité column.

He studies students who are attending Classes Prépa Scientifiques (in short CPGE, that’s 2 years of very intensive undergraduate courses just after high school at the end of which students attempt various competitive exams to enter a variety of Schools, mainly in engineering but also in Math or Computer Science like the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, ÉNS).

One stunning statistic from Pierrel’s article, which underlines the sociological clichés that teachers are (subconsciously?) transmitting to their students,  is the following (I’ve cut some inessential details, translation below):

Dans le cadre de notre recherche sur les CPGE scientifiques, nous avons suivi une promotion d’élèves (n = 176, soit deux classes MPSI-MP et deux de PCSI-PC) au prisme de leurs […] bulletins scolaires semestriels, en relevant systématiquement les types d’appréciations qui y figuraient.
Le constat est sans appel : alors même que filles et garçons réussissent en première année aussi bien les uns que les autres (ce qu’objectivent des passages en classe étoile en 3/2 dans les mêmes proportions), les jugements professoraux diffèrent. Aux filles, le « sérieux » ; aux garçons, le « potentiel » ou les « capacités inexploitées ». Le lien entre ces jugements différenciés et la construction de la croyance en sa valeur scolaire est lui aussi patent : ceux dont le « potentiel » est souligné à trois reprises ou plus dans les bulletins semestriels tentent leur chance au concours de l’ÉNS proportionnellement trois fois plus souvent que les autres (ie. deux occurrences ou moins). De sorte que les filles, pourtant aussi souvent que les garçons dans les classes étoiles de ce lycée, sont sous-représentées parmi ceux qui ont passé le concours de l’ÉNS. Ce n’est là qu’une facette du caractère collectif de la construction de la croyance en sa valeur scolaire. Il conviendrait de souligner également le rôle des milieux sociaux d’origine […]

Rough translation :

In the framework of our study on scientific CPGE, we have followed a cohort of students (n=176, two sets of Math-Physics majors over the two years, and two sets of Physics-Chemistry majors over the two years) by the prism of the written marks and comments given by their teacher to recap each semester.

The findings are without possible contest that : even though girls and boys succeed evenly in the first year (which is objectivized by the fact that they are allowed or not in the starred second year classes [the most select classes] in the same proportions)  the judgements of the professors differ. To girls, “seriousness” ; to boys, “potential” or “inexploited abilities”.  The link between these differentiated jugdments and the construction of one’s belief in one’s academic value is also apparent : those whose “potential” is underligned three times or more attempt the ÉNS competitive exam three times more often than those whose “potential” is mentioned two times or less. To the effect that girls, even though they are in the same amount as boys in the starred classes of the CPGE under study, are under-represented among those who attempt the ÉNS competitive exam. This is only one aspect of the collective character of the construction of one’s belief in one’s academic value. The role of the social origins of the students should also be underlined […]

 

Food for thought for all those involved in teaching…

[As usual, comments are moderated and appear during daytime of the european time zone.]

Conference on Topos Theory at IHÉS in november

The controversy that Olivia Caramello very publicly had with several category theorists (see her website and the comment section of a post by Urs Schreiber) seems to have ended.

Indeed, she mentionned yesterday that she is organizing at IHÉS next november with Pierre Cartier, Alain Connes, Stéphane Dugowson and Anatole Khélif a conference on Topos Theory. (The poster has a tremendous quote from Grothendieck, which definitely has a “let’s make peace” ring to it.)

Also, there’s a 2-day tutorial by Caramello and André Joyal planned just before the conference, so that’s a friendly setting for graduate students and newcomers.

In other news, the conference held in the memory of Grothendieck at Montpellier will take place in a couple weeks, with the schedule now out.

 

Some forthcoming conferences

Still opened for registration, one finds :

• in Harbin, China, next july , a large summer school on pure and applied maths with an All-star list of speakers
• also in july, at Northwestern, a summer school on Geometric Analysis
• the Lalonde Fest in late august in Montréal, for lots of symplectic stuff
• in Marseille in early september, a conference on Additive Combinatorics

The curved arch decorated with floral patterns and bearing a relief of Tyche, the goddess of victory, Temple of Hadrian, Ephesus, Turkey by Carole Raddato on flickr

Several new journals in Diamond Open Access

I have again added some new journals to my list of those in Diamond Open Access (plus some with currently a fee waiver) :

• three from Cedram.org :
  • a new journal in applied math that looks set to be of the highest quality : SMAI Journal of Computational Mathematics
  • a well-established pure math journal that has recently switched to Diamond Open Access : Annales de l’Institut Fourier
  • another journal that seems completely open too is PMB Algèbre et Théorie des Nombres from the university of Besançon
• two from MSP which I had overlooked :
  • the Journal for Software in Algebra and Geometry
  • and Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems

 

Still on that topic, it is noticeable that Forum of Mathematics, Pi  (which has currently a fee waiver but is not Diamond Access) has published only 7 papers in the space of 3 years : even if it is selecting the very top submissions and routing the rest to Forum of Mathematics, Sigma that’s still much less than the non-Diamond-too but much older Annals of Mathematics or Journal of the AMS.

So, just perhaps, FMP might need to become Diamond to actually make a challenge in the top notch category.

Miscellaneous items

Yet another small list of noticeable facts:

• videos of the talks given at the main wokshop of the MSRI program Geometric and Arithmetic Aspects of Homogeneous Dynamics are now online ; and don’t miss the nice spring issue of the emissary for related content
• lots of interesting books are due to appear this year, including The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (in september), and the english translation of an opus of Choimet & Queffelec (in july)
• Anton Geraschenko, of MO fame, has a paper in Algebraic Geometry with David-Zureick-Brown, possibly making it a contender for first pure math paper with a Google-affiliated co-author
• Cédric Villani has recently visited Iran for a week, great to see he’s really putting lots of efforts to reach out to people not just in the Western countries.
• A question: Does anybody know what happened to FEATURED REVIEWS in Mathscinet ? Last time I checked they pretty much discontinued them around 2005, yet these were truly useful…

Cyclidefibo1 by fdecomite on flickr

Scarcity of research positions and number of new PhDs

This is a very touchy subject that is very rarely seen discussed in the open. But a recent thread (now closed) of discussions over at les-mathematiques.net, involving a dozen french people (candidates, lecturers and professors) provides a rare oportunity to address it.

Needless to say, I’m wholly unqualified for this (not being a researcher myself, and all that), so the main aim of this post is to throw out ideas.

I vividly remember, while an undergraduate around 1998 at Institut Fourier, seeing a small queue of nervous-looking slightly older folks in front of an office : auditions were taking place for a position of Maître de Conférence (=Lecturer). That is, people who had qualified to compete (see Michael Harris’ post), and been short-listed for that position.

Already at the time, I had heard that some auditions (not all, of course) were a bit of a farce since the chosen candidate had already been decided, and so the others who came had not a chance (and didn’t even get a refund of their travel expenses).

Why organise such auditions, one might ask. Well, because it’s the law : these are state positions, so while each university has its comittees, there’s a common legislative framework in which this takes place.

Already at the time, a nationwide website was being used, Opération Postes. The same site is being used for Professor positions (so this is very different from universities in the US or UK were lecturers get promoted if they meet targets, in France becoming a Professor usually involves moving to another university).

We’re now mid-may, so right in the middle of the audition & results period, which can be followed on that website.

Hence the aforementionned public discussion : it was started by a high school teacher who has recently finished his PhD, got hooked on research on invariant theory, but was despairing to see that this topic was out of fashion and would have had a vague chance at only a couple of the about 15 opened positions for university lecturers in France [edit: in pure maths, there are about 45 in applied math] (there are also 8+2 research-only junior positions at CNRS, where the process is different, results here and here). He was wondering what to do next (whether to quit doing research altogether, or maybe get a high-teaching-load position at a technical college) and he wrote

Bref, je ne comprends plus comment faire de la recherche. Je ne comprends plus les critères de recrutement. Plusieurs prof m’ont même clairement dit (sur Marseille) : “J’ai pris un étudiant en thèse, mais franchement, il n’a aucune perspective”. Même au niveau d’un post-doc qui m’avait été proposé (loin de chez moi) en maths pures, la personne m’a clairement dit : “Après le post-doc, dans ce domaine en maths, il n’y a aucune perspective”.

Rough translation

In short, I do not understand anymore how to do research. I do not understand anymore the recutment criteria. Several Professors have even explcitely told me (at Marseille) : “I took a PhD student, but frankly there’s no perspective”. Even at the level of a post-doc that I had been offered (far from where I live) in pure maths, the person told me explicitely : “After the post-doc, in that area of maths, there’s no perspective whatsoever”.

The thread then departed into all kinds of directions, some topics touched upon :

• the scarcity of positions compared to the amount of new PhDs (each year the three Écoles Normales Supérieures recruit about 120 undergraduates in pure & applied maths, probably a good third of whom get a PhD, not to mention École Polytechnique, and the many large and small french universities)
• the fact that in recent years several chosen candidates came from abroad (Italy, China…), some arguing it is a normal thing if they are the best (and that the situation in those countries is probably worse), others that it is a bad message for french students
• the fact that until recently the chosen candidates were very young (recent PhDs) and that it was a bit of a gamble (some not producing much onwards), although the trend seems to evolve towards candidates with at least a one-year postdoc

 

Since all this is pretty interesting, I’m leaving the comment section below open if anyone would like to mention opinions (I’ll moderate it quite heavily though to stay strictly on topic).

In particular, what could be done to help people like the OP (=people with a proven track-record of publications but no academic position) not to quit research ?  An idea would be a website to create a sense of community, together with a special fund to allow such people to financially attend one conference every two years. Where would the money come from ? What about some crowdfunding : “click here to donate $1 to a fund for non-academic mathematicians” ?

 

Speakers at the 7th European Congress of Mathematics announced

The next ECM will take place in Berlin in july 2016.   The plenary and invited speakers have been announced in the past two days, here are the lists, to which I’ve added links to homepages (URLs valid as of today) :

Plenary speakers

• Karine Chemla, CNRS, University Paris Diderot & ERC Project SAW
• Alexandr A. Gaifullin, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
• Gil Kalai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Antti Kupiainen, University of Helsinki
• Clément Mouhot, University of Cambridge
• Daniel Peralta-Salas, Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas, Madrid
• Leonid Polterovich, Tel Aviv University
• Peter Scholze, Universität Bonn
• Karen Vogtmann, University of Warwick
• Barbara Wohlmuth, Technische Universität München

Invited speakers

• Spiros Argyros, National Technical University of Athens
• Anton Baranov, St. Petersburg State University
• Nicolas Bergeron, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris
• Bo Berndtsson, Chalmers University of Technology
• Christian Bonatti, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon
• Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace, Université Catholique de Louvain
• Dmitry Chelkak, ETH Zürich
• Amin Coja-Oghlan, Goethe Universität Frankfurt
• Sergio Conti, Universität Bonn
• Massimo Fornasier, Technische Universität München
• Christophe Garban, Université Lyon 1
• Moti Gitik, Tel Aviv University
• Leonor Godinho, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon
• Peter Keevash, University of Oxford
• Radha Kessar, City University London
• Kaisa Matomäki, University of Turku
• Bertrand Maury, Université Paris Sud
• James Maynard, University of Oxford
• Sylvie Méléard, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau CNRS
• Halil Mete Soner, ETH Zürich
• Roman Mikhailov, Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow
• Giuseppe Mingione, Università degli Studi di Parma
• Fabio Nobile, École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne
• Joaquim Ortega-Cerda, Universitat de Barcelona
• Gábor Pete, Budapest University of Technology & Economics
• Tristan Rivière, ETH Zürich
• Elisabetta Rocca, Weierstrass Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, Berlin
• Silvia Sabatini, Universität zu Köln
• Giuseppe Savaré, Università degli studi di Pavia
• Nikolay Tzvetkov, University of Cergy-Pontoise
• Stefaan Vaes, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
• Anna Wienhard, Universität Heidelberg
• Geordie Williamson, Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik Bonn

Abel lecture : Yakov G. Sinai
Friedrich Hirzebruch Lecture : Don Zagier
Public lecture : Helmut Pottmann
Next Generation Outreach Lecture : Peter Scholze (a lecture for high-schoolers, what a great idea!)

And to track the balance of genders, that’s 30% women for plenary speakers (3/10), and 21% for invited speakers (7/33).

 

Some recent items

Yet another pot-pourri of links :

• École Normale Supérieure, with the support of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has opened yesterday a position of Chair for a Full Professor in the fields of Analysis, Probability or Dynamical Systems
• János Pintz has just announced a proof of a long open conjecture of Erdős, Pólya and Turán, thus establishing for example that since and then the sequence of prime sums , that is , will change signs infinitely often
• MO is still able to come up with highly interesting simple looking questions, which is good news
• closing date is may 15th for the summer school at Institut Fourier on Geometric measure Theory and Calculus of Variations, featuring in particular Fermat Prizewinner Camillo De Lellis and new Princeton Professor Fernando Codá Marques (besides, the view from the campus is quite nice)
• and, finally, readers who collect strange objets will have the opportunity on may 6th to bid for a handle of Gaspard Monge’s coffin (presumably obtained during his tranfer to the Panthéon in 1989)

 

Anticipating the Ramanujan biopic

Earlier this month, the TFI SLOAN Filmmaker fund announced its grantees for 2015, and the Srinivasa Ramanujan biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity, now in post-production, is among them.

That’s definitely a movie that could be inspiring indeed, given that Ken Ono has been very much involved in the project and the cast is full of competent actors, as mentionned in Adriana Salerno’s earlier informative blog post.

So its release will probably be a good opportunity to set up public conferences on related topics, or at least get prepared for some questions.

The wikipedia article seems to have a fairly comprehensive compilation of references that could be useful in this regard, including :

• Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an AMS 2000 reprint of the 1927 original
• Ramanujan : Letters and Commentary, by Bruce C. Berndt and Robert A. Rankin (AMS, 1995)
• Ramanujan : Essays and Surveys, by the same authors (AMS, 2001)
• The Mathematical Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan, by M. Ram Murty and V. Kumar Murty (Springer, 2012)
• The Tata Institute has a Collectors’s edition of the first three notebooks and a free pdf version of the original on this page
• There are 4 volumes on the lost notebook by Georges E. Andrews and Bruce C. Berndt (Springer, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013)
• Ramanujan 125, edited by Krishnaswami Alladi and Frank Garvan and Ae Ja Yee (AMS, 2014)
• A recent proof of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, which has some of its roots in Ramanujan’s “mock Theta” functions, is nicely popularized in an article by Erica Klarreich in Quanta Magazine

A mix of links

A mix of recently spotted things:

• the program of the next Bourbaki seminar (at the end of june) looks very interesting indeed (in particular, I also noticed that Peter Keevash released a new preprint recently, while Sophie Morel is currently an Aisenstadt Chair in CRM)
• a new video of Alain Connes discussing the emergence of time in quantum mechanics, published today on the youtube channel of IHÉS
• the conference on Shinichi Mochizuki’s IUT theory, previously mentionned on this blog, will feature lots of people including Paul Vojta and Peter Sholze
• it is announced in the march newsletter of the EMS that the next 10 prizes for European mathematicians under 35 will be awarded for work accepted for publication before october 31, 2015
• the amount of french math students that compete each year to get an Agrégation de Mathématiques has again dropped in 2015, and has declined by a staggering 60% in the past 8 years tweeted the President of the Agrégation Jury (as a result, the past few years have seen hundreds of unfilled positions, and this year will be no different)
• a recent addition in Gallica : the 1630 translation in french of François Viète’s Algèbre Nouvelle by Vasset, with in particular an illustration of the Problem of Apollonius on the frontispice