Nicolas Bouleau

Nicolas Bouleau
Born	(1945-05-20) 20 May 1945 (age 80) Paris, France
Alma mater	École polytechnique
Known for	Necessary and sufficient topology for continuous functions to converge to a continuous function., [1] With Francis Hirsch, the Energy Image Density conjecture, [2] Theory of errors, [3] Probabilistic visco-elastic mechanics [4]
Awards	Montyon Prize (French Academy of Sciences) (1994) Prix Turgot (1998) [5]
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics Philosophy
Institutions	École des ponts ParisTech Paris VI Pierre and Marie Curie University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University Sciences Po Société mathématique de France
Doctoral advisor	Laurent Schwartz

Nicolas Bouleau is a French mathematician whose essays and responsibilities have taken him into other fields such as architecture, economics, biology and philosophy. The common thread is interpretation. Heterodox understanding of a situation, a text, a program or a theorem is for him at the heart of the research activity. His most recent essays focus on biology, where he proposes a dictionary between the work of the mathematician and that of the synthetic biologist. ^[6]

Biography

His scientific career began after six years of ordinary service as a state civil engineer. It was described by Raphael Larrère in the preface to Penser l'éventuel  ^[7] and by Dominique Bourg in Science et prudence . ^[8] His main professors were Laurent Schwartz, Jacques Neveu, Gustave Choquet, Paul-André Meyer. He was the founder of the mathematics research center at École des Ponts ParisTech, then its director for ten years. He was a founding member of the journal Potential Analysis and editor-in-chief of Annales des Ponts et Chaussées. He taught at the École des Ponts ParisTech, the universities Paris VI and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He delivered over two hundred lectures and gave guest courses at the universities of Kyoto and Osaka (Japan), Swansea (UK), Rome (Italy) and Rabat (Morocco). He is now retired and devotes his time to the environment. He denounces the fact that the volatility of financial markets erases information on resource scarcity ^[9]

Selected bibliography

Books in English

• Dirichlet forms and analysis on Wiener space with Francis Hirsch, De Gruyter, 1991. ISBN   3110129191
• Numerical methods for stochastic processes with Dominique Lépingle, Wiley and Sons, 1994. ISBN   978-0471546412
• Financial Markets and Martingales, Springer 2003. ISBN   1852335823
• Error Calculus for Finance and Physics, the Language of Dirichlet Forms, De Gruyter, 2003. ISBN   3110180367
• Risk and Meaning, Springer, 2011.  ISBN   978-3642176470
• Dirichlet Forms Methods for Poisson Point Measures and Lévy Processes with Laurent Denis, Springer, 2015. ISBN   9783319258188
• The Mathematics of Errors, 448 pages, Springer Nature, 2021. ISBN   978-3-030-88574-8

Philosophy of sciences

• Cinq conférences sur l'indécidabilité, coll. with J-Y. Girard and A. Louveau, Presses de l'École des Ponts, 1983. ISBN   2859780556
• Dialogues autour de la création mathématique, coll. with Laurent Schwartz, Gustave Choquet, Paul Malliavin, Paul-André Meyer, David Nualart, Nicole El Karoui, Richard Gundy, Masatoshi Fukushima, Denis Feyel, Gabriel Mokobodzki, Association Laplace-Gauss, 1997, ISBN   2951148518, rééd. Spartacus IDH, 2015. ISBN   9782366930085
• Introduction à la philosophie des sciences, Spartacus IDH, 2017. ISBN   9782366930245

Essays

• La règle, le compas et le divan, Le Seuil, 2002. ISBN   2020499991
• La modélisation critique, Quae, 2014. ISBN   978-2759221998
• Penser l'éventuel. Faire entrer les craintes dans le travail scientifique, Quae, 2017. ISBN   978-2-75922-546-0
• Le mensonge de la finance, les mathématiques, le signal-prix, et la planète, L'Atelier, 2018. ISBN   9782708245556
• Ce que Nature sait. La révolution combinatoire de la biologie et ses dangers, Presses Universitaires de France, 2021. ISBN   9782130826989
• Science et prudence. Du réductionnisme et autres erreurs par gros temps écologique, with Dominique Bourg, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022, 213 p. ISBN   978-2-13-083769-5
• Le hasard et l'évolution, Presses Universitaires de France, 2024, 228 p. ISBN   978-2-13-086912-2

References

1. N. Bouleau Une structure uniforme sur un espace F(E, F), Cahiers de topologie et géométrie différentielle catégoriques, tome 11, No. 2 (1969), p. 207-214. Cf. also Arzelà's Theorem and strong uniform convergence on bornologies, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 371 (2010) 384–392 (p385), and G. Beer, «The Alexandroff property » Applied General Topology (2010), 11(2), 117-133 (p118).]
2. This conjecture was put forward in 1986, proved in the case of Wiener space with Ornstein-Uhlenbeck form, and was still open forty years later. Cf. N. Bouleau, F. Hirsch, Formes de Dirichlet générales et densité des variables aléatoires réelles sur l'espace de Wiener, Journal of Functional Analysis 69(2) 229-259 (1986), cf. also P. Malliavin Stochastic Analysis, Springer 1997 (p86), and D. Nualart, Malliavin calculus and related topics, Springer, 1991, (p83 et seq.).It has been proved positively in full generality in 2025 by S. Eriksson-Bique and M. Murugan ArXiv:2510.13659 v1 15 Oct. 2025.
3. Cf. The Mathematics of Errors, 448 p., Springer, 2021. ISBN   978-3-030-88574-8
4. N. Bouleau "Viscoélasticité et processus de Lévy" Potential analysis vol 11, n3, 289-302 (1999), cf. also Jean Salençon, Viscoelastic modeling for structural analysis ISTE Wiley, 2019 (p168).
5. "Lauréats meilleur Livre d'Économie Financière" (PDF). 2021. Retrieved 2024-09-04.
6. Cf. Ce que Nature sait, Presses Universitaires de France, 540p, 2021. ISBN   9782130826989; and La biologie contre l'écologie ? Le nouvel empirisme de synthèse, Spartacus-idh, 150p, 2022. ISBN   978-2-36693-112-9, cf. also M. Montévil Computational Empiricism, Philosophy World Democracy, July 2021.
7. Penser l'éventuel, Quae, 2017.
8. Science et prudence, with Dominique Bourg, Presses Universitaires de France, 2022.
9. Cf. N. Bouleau, Financial Markets Were Not Designed to Manage the Planet Public Books, 12.12.2018.

External links

• Nicolas Bouleau's homepage at the CERMICS, (Mathematics and scientific computing research center at École des ponts ParisTech) with articles and lectures.
• Nicolas Bouleau's blog (with 90 posts)
• Nicolas Bouleau publications indexed by Google Scholar