ANTOINE HOULOU-GARCIA
62 articles published in Tangente
History and CultureN°224Jun 11, 2025A stamp bearing Grothendieck's likeness
At the instigation of Éric Bouhier, who had already been behind four other stamps, mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck (1928–2014) was honoured with a stamp issued on 16 June 2025.
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History and CultureN°224Jun 11, 2025From shadow to light
As a learned woman, Émilie du Châtelet sometimes found herself overshadowed by men, beginning with Voltaire. Yet her intellectual freedom allowed her to shine and win genuine recognition.
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History and CultureN°223Apr 14, 2025Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, a mathematician of relativity
Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, who died on 11 February 2025, is known as the first woman to become a member of the Académie des sciences. Dwelling on this fact risks overshadowing the importance of her work. Her colleague Piotr Chruściel takes us through her research, which is little known to the general public.
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History and CultureN°223Apr 14, 2025A tribute to Jacqueline Ferrand
In November 2023, a room named after Jacqueline Ferrand opened in the mathematics and computer science library at ENS Ulm.
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History and CultureN°223Apr 14, 2025Rediscovered manuscripts… or not!
In early February, Türkiye Today announced the discovery of lost manuscripts by Apollonius: Books V and VII, hitherto unknown and now rediscovered in an Arabic translation.
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History and CultureN°223Apr 14, 2025David Hilbert's overhaul of geometry
Though Euclid's axiomatization remained in force for a long time, it was amid the ferment of the German academic world in the nineteenth century that mathematicians began to feel it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. David Hilbert took on the task in 1899.
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History and CultureN°223Apr 09, 2025A mathematical influencer
While it is true that Martin Gardner never took a mathematics course at university, he spent his life studying the subject through his work as a journalist, ultimately receiving numerous honors from the mathematical community.
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History and CultureN°93Feb 13, 2025The lost manuscript of al-Khwārizmī
Al-Khwārizmī is widely known as the father of algebra or as the scholar who introduced Indian numerals to the Arab world. Less well known is that the manuscript of his Livre de l’addition et de la soustraction d’après le calcul indien (Book of Addition and Subtraction According to Indian Arithmetic) is now lost.
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History and CultureN°93Feb 13, 2025Thābit and the Pythagorean theorem
In Sur la preuve attribuée à Socrate au sujet du carré et de sa diagonale (On the Proof Attributed to Socrates Concerning the Square and Its Diagonal), Thābit ibn Qurra examines how squares can be dissected, taking as his starting point the famous example from Plato's Meno. This gives him an opportunity to present two proofs of the Pythagorean theorem and to generalize it.
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History and CultureN°93Feb 12, 2025Al-Khwārizmī's geometry of equations
Quadratic equations have been solved by geometric methods, of varying degrees of sophistication, since Babylonian times. Similar methods appear in the works of Greek authors. But al-Khwārizmī was the first to set out a clear, general method.
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History and CultureN°93Feb 11, 2025What is Arabic-Islamic mathematics?
Arabic-Islamic mathematics developed against a fascinating historical and geopolitical backdrop, shaped in particular by the importance of the Abbasid dynasty, the role of the House of Wisdom, and diplomatic and intellectual ties with neighboring cultures.
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History and CultureN°93Feb 11, 2025Are numerals Arabic?
What most people know of Arab-Islamic mathematics is, above all, the “Arabic numerals”… which are not Arabic at all!
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