180 seconds of popular science

Three minutes flat is not long to sum up a thesis—especially when the presentation has to be accessible to a wide audience. That is the daunting challenge faced each year by a number of French-speaking doctoral students in "My Thesis in 180 Seconds," modelled on the English-language Three Minute Thesis competition.

The preliminary rounds are held locally, at universities, and then nationally. Each country's winners then compete in the international final, which took place this year in Lausanne. Here is a small selection of topics presented at the French final:

• Probabilistic models of population dynamics applied to forests is the title of Arnaud Personne's thesis (Université Clermont-Auvergne). He is working to predict how the types of trees found in forests will change over time;

• Instrumental innovation: developing a combinatorial design method based on an algorithmic language is the subject of Adam Baïz's thesis (Université Paris-Sciences-et-Lettres). His model, which brings together mathematics, economics, political science and computer science, tracks potential obstacles to implementing public policy;

• Philippe Le Bouteiller (Université Grenoble-Alpes) makes seismic waves "talk" to obtain information about the composition of the media they pass through; he represented France at the international final. He won second prize in the audience vote and the jury prize. His thesis is entitled An Eulerian approach to the Hamilton–Jacobi equation using a discontinuous Galerkin method in heterogeneous anisotropic media. Application to seismic imaging.

All the presentations can be viewed online at www.mt180.fr .