Henri Atlan | |
|---|---|
 Henri Atlan in 2011 | |
| Born | 27 December 1931 |
| Nationality | French |
| Alma mater | University of Paris |
| Known for | Complexity from noise |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
Henri Atlan (born 27 December 1931) is a French biophysicist and philosopher.
Born to a Jewish family in French Algeria, Atlan gained degrees in medicine and biophysics at the University of Paris (now University Paris Diderot). He married Liliane Atlan in 1952; they had two children while living in Paris, Miri in 1953 and Michael in 1956. [1] He then moved to the University of California, Berkeley working on ageing [2] and mutation.
Influenced by Heinz von Foerster, Atlan became interested in applying cybernetics and information theory to living organisms, and went to the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot to work under the biophysicist Aharon Katchalsky. [3] In 1972, he returned to Paris; and, in that year, his 1972 work on information theory and self-organising systems, entitled L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information, received a wide readership.[ citation needed ] In this book, he proposed the principle of "complexity from noise" [4] [5] (French : le principe de complexité par le bruit), [6] [7] concept taken up in his following book Entre le cristal et la fumée (1979) [8] and development of 1960 Von Foerster's notion of "order from noise". In Paris, he then taught biophysics at the Hôtel-Dieu and, later, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center. [3] [9]
His participation with Francisco Varela at a conference in Cerisy-la-Salle encouraged interest in cognitive science in France. [3] Atlan was instrumental in the establishment of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA) at the École Polytechnique, and was appointed in 1983 to the Comité Consultatif National d'Éthique pour la Sciences de a Vie et de la Santé (National Advisory Committee on Ethics in the Life Sciences and Medicine). He is director of studies in the philosophy of biology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales , and professor emeritus of biophysics at the University of Paris VI: Pierre et Marie-Curie. [9] He is also a member of Collegium International, [10] an organization of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just, and an economically sustainable world.
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability.
Henri Paul Cartan was a French mathematician who made substantial contributions to algebraic topology.
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French zoologist and an authority on deviation from normal structure. In 1854 he coined the term éthologie (ethology).
Yves Delage was a French zoologist known for his work into invertebrate physiology and anatomy. He also discovered the function of the semicircular canals in the inner ear. He is also famous for noting and preparing a speech on the Turin Shroud, arguing in favour of its authenticity. Delage estimated the probability that the image on the shroud was not caused by the body of Jesus Christ as 1 in 10 billion.
Pierre-André Taguieff is a French philosopher who has specialised in the study of racism and antisemitism. He is the director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in an Institut d'études politiques de Paris laboratory, the Centre for Political Research (CEVIPOF). He is also a member of the Cercle de l'Oratoire think tank.
Philippe Jaccottet was a Swiss Francophone poet and translator.
Bernard Miège is a French media theorist and academic administrator. He is Emeritus Professor of Communication and Information Science at Stendhal University in Grenoble. He was educated at Paris University, both in political studies and in economics. He has a Ph.D. in economics (Paris) and another Ph.D. in humanities (Bordeaux). He is the author of fifteen works in the following fields: the cultural industries, the introduction of the technologies of information and communication in the society and in the organisations, and the analysis of the theories of communication.
Pierre-Paul Grassé was a French zoologist, writer of over 300 publications including the influential 52-volume Traité de Zoologie. He was an expert on termites who rejected Neo-Darwinism and was a proponent of Neo-Lamarckism.
Liliane Aimée Ackermann (1938–2007) was a French microbiologist, Jewish Community pioneer, leader, writer, and lecturer.
Laurent Victor Louis Émile Leredde was a French physician, specialising in dermatology.
Abraham Moles was a pioneer in information science and communication studies in France, He was a professor at Ulm school of design and University of Strasbourg. He is known for his work on kitsch.
UNESCO Headquarters, or Maison de l'UNESCO, is a building inaugurated on 3 November 1958 at number 7 Place de Fontenoy in Paris, France, to serve as the headquarters for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It is a building that can be visited freely.
Gérald Tenenbaum is a French mathematician and novelist, born in Nancy on 1 April 1952.
...à la Fumée is a symphonic composition by Kaija Saariaho written in 1990, at the age of 38. It is a sequel to her 1989-90 work Du Cristal..., and starts where it ends, with a violoncello solo long trill sul ponticello. Both compositions form the title From Glass Into Smoke, inspired by Henri Atlan's 1979 essay Entre le cristal et la fumée: Essai sur l'organisation de vivant. Unlike Du Cristal..., ...à la Fumée features two soloists, a flute and a cello, which are distorted electronically. Lasting circa 18 minutes, it was premiered in Helsinki on 20 March 1991 by flutist Petri Alanko, cellist Anssi Karttunen and the Finnish Radio Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Robert Escarpit, born on 24 April 1918 in Saint-Macaire - 19 November 2000 in Langon (Gironde), was a French academic, writer and journalist. He is most known to the public for his satiric articles in newspapers such as Le Monde in which he wrote around twenty columns per month from 1949 to 1979.
Mauro Ceruti is an Italian philosopher.
The Teissier affair was a controversy that occurred in France in 2001. French astrologer Élizabeth Teissier was awarded a doctorate in sociology by Paris Descartes University for a doctoral thesis in which she argued that astrology was being oppressed by science. Her work was contested by the scientific community within the context of the science wars, and compared to the Sokal hoax. Criticisms included the alleged failure to work within the field of sociology and also lacking the necessary scientific rigour for a doctoral thesis in any scientific field. The university and jury who awarded the degree were harshly criticised, though both they and Teissier had supporters and defenders.
Self-organization, a process where some form of overall order arises out of the local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system, was discovered in cybernetics by William Ross Ashby in 1947. It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.
Liliane Atlan was a French Jewish writer whose work often focused on the psychological effects of the Holocaust.
Jean Garrabé was a French psychiatrist.
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