Two well-known examples published by Belin in the early 1980s illustrate this. Rose Polymath is the mischievous heroine of “chronicles” by mathematician Ian Stewart (born 1945), whose titles hint at the delights in store for readers: Oh! Catastrophe! and Ah! Les beaux groupes!, both published in 1986. Jean-Pierre Petit (born 1937), meanwhile, created an entire series exploring his favorite areas of research at the CNRS, notably cosmology and theoretical physics. The adventures of Anselme Lanturlu span some ten albums, several with a distinctly mathematical focus, such as Le Geometricon and Le Topologicon, both published in 1992. The work of these two authors offers fine examples of how concepts often perceived as difficult can be made accessible to a wider audience. Group theory, the Klein bottle and the geometry of Boy’s surface will no longer hold any secrets for you!
In 2005, Jean-Pierre Petit founded the association Savoir sans frontières (**savoir-sans-frontieres.com**) to make his albums freely available as PDFs and in a great many translations.
