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.
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...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.
François Dagognet was a 20th-century French philosopher.
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Danièle Bourcier is a French lawyer and essayist, who has contributed to the emergence of a new discipline in France: Law, Computing and linguistics.
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.
Maxime Leroy was a French jurist and social historian.
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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