Mathematicians in Paris - II

As I mentioned before, my inspiration to find "mathematical" places in Paris came from David Eugene Smith Historical-Mathematical Paris (The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Mar. - Apr., 1923), pp. 107-113).
David Eugene Smith  (1860-1944) was born in Cortland, NY, just a little more than 20 miles from Ithaca, where I live now. When he died, "the world lost one of the most colorful and influential figures in the fields of the history and teaching of mathematics".(in memorium). Prof. Smith travelled to lecture and to stay in Paris numerous times over the period of 40 years. He was a passionate collector of books, letters and various memorabilia of interest of math historian. From the letters he collected and other sources he learned the addresses of mathematicians in Paris. I was intrigued what I would be able to find 88 years later after his account of "historical-mathematical" Paris was published.
Prof. Smith suggested to start with the most ancient part of the city - the Lutetia, now a part of the Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame stands. In the ancient Palais de Justice there is a little gem of Gothic architecture - Sainte Chapelle. One of its canons was Rollandus, who wrote a general treatise on mathematics c.1425, now this manuscript is in Plimpton Library, Columbia University, New York City.

There is no need to have a mathematical reason to visit Sainte Chapelle - some say it is the best Gothic architecture example. If you have a choice - go there on sunny day to enjoy the stained glass windows!

This picture on the wall can be a little geometry puzzle:

On the other side of the Palais de Justice it is possible to visit the most ancient prison of the city if interested to see Conciergerie.

 

The Notre-Dame Cathedral, mathematically, is most interesting for its Gothic arches and flying butresses.

Between Rue Lagrange and Rue Dante there is a little connector which is all what's left from Rue de Fouarre (street of straw bundles) - the most influential street in medieval times on the Left Bank. In 1215 the rebel intellectuals founded the University of Paris. There were no classrooms available, therefore lessons were taught outdoors, with the students sitting on the bundles of straw.(according to David Burke's Writers in Paris) Across from Notre-Dame the oldest trees in Paris shadow the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.

"Consecrated in 1220, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was just nearing completion when the newly established University of Paris began setting up shop next door. And as the university had no buildings, this little church became its chapel and assembly hall. In the 1520's students rioted and trashed the church, so clergy banned firther assemblies. Albertus Magnus advocated for peacful coexistence os science and religion there and his student Thomas Aquinas lectured there (according D. Burke's book). David Smith mentions both of them lecturing in the convent of the Dominicans or Jacobins that from 1217 to 1790 used to be next to place where now is the Pantheon. There is a plague on the wall there too (currently it is the building of the library).

We enjoyed two beautiful piano performances there. One of my favorite piano pieces is Liszt's Hungarian Rapsody No.2. This was the first time I listen to it live in the concert sitting very close to this piano and watching Herbert du Plessis perform. (I was too shy to ask him how many times he had played this piece since his first performance at the age of 8.)

The Pantheon is neo-classic temple built on the highest point of the Latin Quarter. It is a place where French grandes hommes are burried (only two are women - Marie Curie and Sophie Berthelot). In 1851, physicist Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the Earth by his experiment conducted in the Panthéon, by constructing a 67 meter Foucault pendulum beneath the central dome. Mathematicians Lagrange, Lazare Carnot, Paul Painleve , physicist Jean Perrin are burried there, and both Pierre and Marie Curie were enshrined in the crypt in April 1995. Gaspard Monge and Marquis de Condorcet were buried at the time of the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution.
There is still a monument at Pere Lachese cemetery at the first burial place for Monge.

If you face the entrance of the Pantheon on the left behind it you see the Eglise Saint-Etienne-du Mont where Pascal is buried. Descartes was first buried here also but in 1819 his remains were transferred to the Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

In this alcove Pascal's neighbour is Racine, the name you will recognize if you are familiar with the history of theatre.



Rue Descartes  took me to the Ecole Politechnique, which was founded during the French Revolution by two mathematicians - Lazare Carnot and Gaspard Monge and has always been one of the most elite schools as one can see from the list of notable Ecole Politechnique alumni.

If somebody knows whose portraits are those above the name of the school, please let me know.

Rue Descartes took me to the Place de la Contrescarpe which was the center of the area that in Middle Ages lay outside the city walls. It has long been a haven for outsiders, real and fictional. It was this area described by Balzac in his Le Pere Goriot, one of my required readings in high school. It was this area where young Ernest Hemingway with his wife Hadley had his first home in Paris.

Rue Rollins No. 14 is one of many addresses where Rene Descartes lived.

His famous portrait by Dutch painter Frans Hals (1580-1666) is in Louvre.

According David Smith Rue Rollins No.2 was the house of Marguerite Perier - Pascal's sister, and Blaise Pascal died there.

Returning back to Place de la Contrescarpe I continue my walk on Rue Moufetard, famous ancient market street that has been featured in many literary works by the writers who enjoyed this lively area. It is getting dark, soon restaurants will start to open their door for diners, my thoughts are turning away from mathematical interests towards to the memories of literary descriptions of the area. Another mathematical walk will be next time.
p.s. I am adding here
Paris sites by J. Kiernan (1/26/99) which he posted on Historia Matematica mailing list in 1999.

A good place to begin is the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers on
Boulevard de Sabastopol. The museum contains one of Pascal's original
adding machines. Near-by are the Archives National. Before you reach
the Seine you will pass Tour St. Jacques. Inside the tower there is
a statue of Pascal commemorating his experiments on air pressure.
To the right is the Louvre which contains a Frans Hals portrait of
Descartes and a Houdin statue of Pascal. As you cross the Seine at the Pont des Arts you will arrive at the Academie des Sciences. Take Rue Bonaparte to the Church of St. Germain de Pres. Inside there is a cenotaph dedicated to Descartes. Follow Boul. St. Germain to the inn La Procope and have the lunch special (if its not dinnertime yet!). In one direction you will find the birthplace of Sophie Germain. If you follow Rue M. de Prince to the end, at No. 54 you will find a plaque commemorating Pascal's (n-1)th domicile. Now follow Rue Sufflot to the Pantheon. Spend some time there. Behind the Pantheon is St. Etienne de Mont, Pascal's church. You will find two plaques and a bust inside. Behind the church is 16 Rue Rollin where Descartes once lived. Continue past Rue Monge to the Jardin des Plants. Inside you will find a statue of its curator, Buffon. Double back to Rue Monge and follow it to the Ecole Polytechnique, the home of an entire class of 19th Century mathematicians. Nearby is the
University including College de France, where Roberval taught, and the
Sorbonne. The University is one of the oldest in Europe and specialized in theology and logic.

On another day you may wish to start out at Port Royal, the refuge of Pascal, and walk to the Observatory which is only open to the public once a month by appointment. Behind the Place Denfert Rocherau there is the Hotel Sophie Germain. Nearby there is a market on Rue Daguerre. Walking down this rue you will pass Rue Gassendi and Rue Fermat. Make a left to Cimetiere de Montparnasse, the burial place of Poincare. On the other side of the cimetiere is Rue Huyghens.

If you visit the Tour Eiffel, you will find several plaques dedicated
to mathematicians. Nearby is 108 Rue de Bac where Laplace resided.
Across the Seine is the Palais de la Decouverte which has exhibits on the history of mathematics. Condorcet met his fate at Place de Concorde.

If you take the train just south of Paris to the suburb of Acueil, you will find many commemorations of Laplace. If you want to see his birthplace, you need to take a train from Gare St. Lazare to Pont L'Eveque. About 7 km away is the small town of Beaumont en Auge. You can walk it on a nice day.

The cathedral at Chartres is a living monument to education. On the West
Portal there are relief personifications of the seven liberal arts. These
include Pythagoras, Aristotle and Ptolemy. Take time to investigate the
circular maze inside the cathedral.

Mathematicians in Paris - I

What happens when mathematicians go to Paris? For us - me and my husband - the first experience was in Roissy (Charles de Gaulle) airport. While looking for trains to Paris one of our carry-on bags disappeared in a seemingly empty place. Caution - never let the bag handle out of your hand, not even for a second! Besides a little computer and two of my cameras (which I was using for taking pictures for my book) and all other precious things you take with you on a trip (and put in your carry-on bag not to lose!), gone were guide books, English-French dictionaries and my notes of places I wanted to find in Paris. Well, it meant I had no choice but start my "trip planning" over and see what I find as I go.
Paris has long been a magnet for artists and writers - medieval poet-thief François Villon, Molière ("It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable"), Voltaire, George Sand, Ernest Hemingway (If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.), Simone de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan, Marcel Proust ("...we go off to a city to seek out a soul that it cannot contain but which we no longer have the power to expel from its nature."), Guillaume Apollinaire - just a few names from a long list of writers I have been associated with Paris since high school (yes, I was attending a school for students accelerating in math and physics, but I was reading like crazy - we did not have TV at home...). Paris has honored writers by naming more than 400 streets, squares, or promenades in their names according to David Burke's Writers in Paris.

Mathematicians are also loved in Paris, (not as much as writers though :-) ) but still there are about 100 streets named after mathematicians. There was no way to find all of them, and sometimes I forgot to take a picture of the street sign, but I found some. Already before my trip I saw the post with pictures in The n-Category Cafe and I found some more links:Paris streets named after mathematicians and Photos os street signs by arrondisment. But the real inspiration to find "mathematical places" in Paris was the paper by David Eugene Smith Historical-Mathematical Paris. (I will tell you next time how I tried to find places mentioned there.) (Here is an interesting collection of Monuments on Mathematicians to explore.)

And so - this is Paris:

Not really all of it, just about a quarter may be. Where do you start to get close to Paris? At Point Zero?

Or you try to get up close and personal to some of the images you had in your mind for a long time:

Of course, we went to say "Bonjour!" to the famous lady as did hundreds of others:

It is polite to do so, especially because I had met her in the 1970's when Armand Hammer brought her to Moscow. I have to admit, even if La Joconde is the most famous painting in the world, my favourite da Vinci painting is Madonna Litta in Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg:

We saw much more in the Louvre than objects marked with stars in tour guides. On an extremely rainy day it was a good workout to stroll through numerous galleries. You can do a virtual tour through the Louvre.
Paris is not only a classical beauty - we enjoyed some modern parts of it also:

Occasionally I remembered about the street signs and took pictures of them.
 Descartes perhaps was honored as a mathematician and as a philosopher, therefore he has two streets. Or may be having several streets named after him stresses how often he used to change his address.

Lagrange is considered alternatively Italiand and French mathematician - Lagrange survived the French Revolution and became the first professor of analysis at the École Polytechnique upon its opening in 1794. Napoleon named Lagrange to the Legion of Honour and made him a Count of the Empire in 1808. He is buried in the Panthéon.

Pierre-Simon Laplace is remembered as one of the greatest scientists of all time, sometimes referred to as a French Newton or Newton of France.

I have to confess. I knew nothing about Maurice Audin who disappeared during The Battle of Algiers in 1957 never having a chance to defend his doctoral thesis. In June 2007, fifty years after her husband's disappearance, Madame Audin wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly-elected French president, asking him that the mystery of her husband's disappearance be cleared up.

In January 2009, Michèle Audin, the daughter of Maurice Audin, herself a mathematician, publicly declined the French Legion d'Honneur, which had been awarded for her work. As a motivation for her refusal, she cited the lack of response from the French government to her mother's letter.



Another mathematician who suffered because of his political views was Marquis de Condorcet. I have missed rue Condorcet in Paris which is another one named after him like it was with Descartes.

What would be Paris without love? I remeber this song since my childhood.

Maîtresse, embrasse-moi, baise-moi, serre-moi
Maîtresse, embrasse-moi, baise-moi, serre-moi,
Haleine contre haleine, échauffe-moi la vie,
Mille et mille baisers donne-moi je te prie,
Amour veut tout sans nombre, amour n'a point de loi.
(Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585))  

There are more than one ways of saying "I love you". This is a wall where "I love you" is written in 311 languages. There is a video of it here.

More about my trip to Paris next time...

Kinetic art - sculptures in motion

Kinetic art combines art, engineering and mathematics - I am not sure which of these three components comes first. And there are not only these three - creativity in finding ways to express ideas, making parts... Leonardo da Vinci was reading ancient texts and then sketching ideas of those machines which led him to add his own fantasies. Was he thinking only about practical uses of his machines? Perhaps not, because many ideas we now find in his Notebooks are way ahead of its time. Was he the first kinetic artist?






Art historians are calling Marcel Duchamp to be the first for his Bicycle Wheel in 1913. From MOMA description:
"Bicycle Wheel is Duchamp's first Readymade—class of objects he invented to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art. Here Duchamp chose two mass-produced parts—a bicycle wheel and a kitchen stool—and put them together in an assemblage, creating a sort of nonfunctional machine."

Well, I am not an art historian to judge. My personal experience with geometry needed to create motion started when I got involved in Reuleaux kinemtic model digitization project that eventually grew in large digital library KMODDL. When I found the video about Reuben Margolin making wave sculptures, I remembered my writing on history of linkages which now I wish I could re-do. (I guess I should put it on my "to do" list.)

This is really fascinating. When you watch it, do not miss fast paced place when he does calculations! :-)



It prompted me to find some more kinetic sculptures - like this one in BMW museum:


Joe Gilbertson Kinetic Sculpture:



Teo Jansen and kinetic sculptures:


Arthur Ganson has several videos on his page.
Here are more links to kinetic sculptures, and of course you can search for more.