Michèle Audin

In 2013 she was awarded the Prix Ève Delacroix for her novel Une vie brève.

In 2009 she refused to receive the Legion of Honour, on the grounds that the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had refused to respond to a letter written by her mother regarding the disappearance of her father. Finally in September 2018, French president Emmanuel Macron admitted that Maurice Audin was tortured to death and apologized on behalf of France.

Alongside her activity as a mathematician, Audin leads an intense literary activity on her own and, since 2009, within the Oulipo.

She became part of Oulipo in 2009, as the first member to be both a mathematician and a writer. Mathematics is for her both a source of inspiration for the constraints she invents and a recurring theme in her literary work. For example, in her novel La formule de Stokes, the heroine is a mathematical formula.

She then became a professor at the Institut de recherche mathématique avancée [fr] (IRMA) of the Université de Strasbourg from 1987 until her early retirement in 2014. She was president of the association Femmes et mathématiques in 1990 and 1991.

She studied at École normale supérieure de jeunes filles within the École Normale Supérieure and then she earned a Ph.D. degree in 1986 from the University of Paris-Saclay, with a thesis written under the supervision of François Latour, entitled Cobordismes d'immersions lagrangiennes et legendriens [Cobordisms of Lagrangian and Legendrian immersions].

Michéle Audin is the daughter of mathematician Maurice Audin and mathematics teacher Josette Audin [fr], both pied-noirs and political activists. While she was a child, her father died under torture in June 1957 in Algeria, after being arrested by General Jacques Massu's paratroopers.

Michèle Audin (Algiers, 3 January, 1954) is a French mathematician, writer, and a former professor. She has worked as a professor at the University of Geneva, the University of Paris-Saclay and most recently at the University of Strasbourg, where she performed research notably in the area of symplectic geometry.

Audin's work on Kovalevskaya top led her to write another book, both mathematical, historical and more personal on this mathematician: "Souvenirs sur Sofia Kovalevskaya". She also published the correspondence (1928-1991) of two members of the Bourbaki group, the mathematicians Henri Cartan and André Weil, she wrote the first biography of the mathematician Jacques Feldbau, and she documented the genesis of the modern holomorphic dynamics, with detailed portraits of the main protagonists: Pierre Fatou, Gaston Julia and Paul Montel.

Passionate about the insurrection of the Paris Commune of 1871, Audin has written five books on this topic to document its history as well as its memory: two novels published by Gallimard, Comme une rivière bleue (2017) and Josée Meunier, 19 rue des Juifs (2021), as well as three historical books published by Libertalia [fr]. The first, Eugène Varlin, bookbinding worker 1839-1871 (2019), is an anthology of the various writings of Eugène Varlin, some of which have not been published since their original release. The second, C'est la nuit surtout que le combat devient furieux (2020), publishes the correspondence between Alix Payen [fr], an unknown paramedic, and her Fourierist family, during the few months of the Parisian insurrection. The last, La Semaine sanglante: Mai 1871. Légendes et comptes (2021), proposes a new counting of the deaths of Bloody Week, going up to “certainly 15,000 dead”.