The celebrated group of mathematicians, whose members included Henri Cartan, André Weil and Jean Dieudonné, came together in the mid-1930s to bring mathematics teaching into line with the new approaches that had emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
These renowned mathematicians met on December 10, 1934, at the Café Capoulade, on the sidelines of a talk by Jean Delsarte at the Julia seminar, held in the newly built Institut Henri-Poincaré in the very heart of the Latin Quarter. They decided to join forces and write, under a pseudonym, a rigorous treatise on analysis for students.
The project would take shape in Auvergne in July 1935, at a conference in Besse (now Besse-et-Saint-Anastaise, in Puy-de-Dôme). More broadly, this legendary group gave us a new perspective on mathematics as a whole.
The town hall of the 5th arrondissement had the welcome idea of installing a plaque—though it is difficult to spot…—on August 30 last year to commemorate this first meeting. It stands at 63 Boulevard Saint-Michel, where the now-vanished café once stood.
