Born in 1976, Nalini Anantharaman is the daughter of two academics from Orléans: her mother is a mathematician and her father a computer scientist. Her academic record was flawless: after excelling at the Lycée Voltaire in Orléans (Loiret), she entered the classes préparatoires (post-secondary preparatory classes) at Louis-le-Grand in Paris and was admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1994, at just 18!
Her research, which spans several branches of mathematics, is impossible to sum up: "I don't like things to be compartmentalized. I love exploring new avenues and discovering things I don't know," she says. One recurring theme, however, is the study of wave disorder in quantum mechanics, at the intersection of spectral theory and number theory.
Continuing her flawless career, she joined the mathematics section of the Académie des sciences in 2019, then was appointed to the Chair of Spectral Geometry at the Collège de France. There she joined Xavier Leroy, another mathematician—or rather, computer scientist—from Orléans.
