Karine Chemla, mathematician and sinologist | Tangente

Karine Chemla is a historian of mathematics at Université Paris-Cité and emerita research director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), attached to the SPHERE laboratory (Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire) at the same university. She is currently developing a project on the history of mathematical symbolism at the University of Edinburgh. In 2025, she was elected academician of the Académie des sciences in the discipline "History, Philosophy and Ethics of Science". She works on the notions of demonstration, proof and mathematical symbolization, and on the way mathematics is embedded in extra-European worlds, particularly Chinese-speaking ones.

Karine Chemla: I studied mathematics out of passion for the subject, completing my studies at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1982. At the suggestion of the director at the time, Josiane Serre, in late 1979 I had submitted a project to obtain a long-distance travel grant from the Fondation Singer-Polignac, proposing to look into the relationship between science and culture and, for that purpose… to go to China. This choice of China stemmed from the conventional idea that, since China had been isolated from the rest of the world throughout its history (what a mistake!), it offered ideal conditions for reflecting on the subject I had set myself. At the time, however, I did not speak a word of Chinese.

With the grant secured, I had the immense privilege of becoming the first foreign student at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences). At the time, foreigners and Chinese nationals were kept separate in China, so I had a curriculum designed for me alone, with five Chinese researchers specializing in the field as my teachers. I had begun learning Chinese in a rush in the autumn of 1980, in preparation for this trip, but on my arrival in China, on 6 April 1981, I was barely able to form a sentence, since my self-taught study had focused mainly on characters and included no practical component. As my teachers spoke, besides Chinese, only Russian or Japanese, it was a rough start, but I cannot imagine better conditions for learning a language. And by the end of my stay, in November 1981, I had become able to hold conversations and follow classes.