Famous figures
Portraits of famous mathematicians, historical and contemporary
Sak Tahn Waax: the first Maya mathematician to sign his calculations
Discovered at Xultún in Guatemala: the signature of the first formally identified Maya mathematician, Sak Tahn Waax, who calculated the cycles of Venus and Mars around 781 CE.
Measuring infinity: how Borel and Lebesgue went beyond Newton
Explore Lebesgue measure, Borel's normal numbers and the foundations of probability theory through the history of mathematics.
How a specialist in probability becomes a pillar of the Republic of Professors
A portrait of Émile Borel, the illustrious mathematician of the Belle Époque, who combined a brilliant scientific career with political engagement and a fight for justice.
Émile Borel: Why fund a thousand researchers to find one?
A portrait of Émile Borel's commitment to funding scientific research, European cooperation, and the evolution of his political thought from radicalism to liberalism.
Alexandre Grothendieck: the quest for mathematical language
A portrait of Grothendieck, a mathematical genius whose practice was intimately bound up with an aesthetics of language, from schemes to topoi.
Terence Tao warns: AI writes proofs no one can read
Terence Tao warns of a new threshold: AI is accelerating proof formalization, but producing results too verbose for humans to understand.
Mathematicians and atheism: Laplace, Erdős and Hardy defy God
Laplace, Erdős and Hardy: three anecdotes about mathematicians who used logic and mathematics to question the existence of God.
The three certainties on which Descartes built all of his physics
How Descartes built his philosophy on three certainties: the existence of the thinking subject, divine goodness, and mathematical rigor.
Whitehead: logical harmony of mathematics and philosophy
A journey into the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, who laid the foundations of the Principia Mathematica with Russell and developed a metaphysics of the cosmos in which God and mathematics work together in the world's unfolding.
Gladys West: the mathematician who made GPS possible
A portrait of Gladys West, the African-American mathematician whose geodetic models enabled the development of modern GPS.
Michèle Audin: mathematician, writer and Oulipian
Michèle Audin's life brought together several forms of commitment. Professional mathematician, writer, social and political activist: every strand was intertwined with and enriched the others.
Edward Kasner: the man behind googol and googolplex
Staggeringly large numbers invented by an eccentric mathematician that would inspire an iconic domain name...
Knuth and Conway notations for mind-boggling numbers
When it comes to representing extremely large numbers, the standard operations, including exponentiation, are no longer enough. With considerable imagination, Donald Knuth and John Conway devised notations to overcome this limitation.
Patrice Jeener: the mathematical engraver who turned equations into art
Patrice Jeener (1944–2026) passed away on March 3 in his village of La Motte-Chalancon, in the Drôme.
Cédric Aubouy, math clown and author of “Je ne sais pas”
Cédric Aubouy, a mathematical clown and founder of the L’île logique company, agreed to meet us to mark the publication of his first novel, Je ne sais pas ou la disparition des mathématiciens.
Gabriel Cramer: the journey of an 18th-century Genevan mathematician
Explore Gabriel Cramer's journey, from his education in Geneva to his European Grand Tour among the leading mathematicians of his day.
666: When the devil shows up in math | Tangente
From the biblical 666 to the Belphegor number, certain numbers send a shiver down the spine… and bring a smile to mathematicians' faces. Behind these "cursed" objects, the creativity and ingenuity of recreational mathematics run wild, ranging from number games to diabolical curiosities.
A tribute to Michèle Audin | Tangente
Michèle Audin, a mathematician at the University of Strasbourg who specialized in symplectic geometry (at the intersection of differential geometry and dynamical systems), died on November 14, 2025.
Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline | Tangente
This past November 19, a Pascaline dating from 1642, valued at between two and three million euros, was due to go under the hammer at Christie’s in Paris.
Conway's power trains | Tangente
Power trains are iterated functions introduced by Conway.