Differential equations, infinitesimal calculus, theory of dynamical systems… The Maison Henri Poincaré, the first museum in France entirely devoted to mathematics and their applications, will open its doors to the public on September 30 in the Latin Quarter in Paris, announced Tuesday the CNRS. Desired by the former deputy and mathematician Cédric Villani ten years ago, the museum occupies 900 m2 in the Jean-Perrin building of the Henri-Poincaré Institute (IHP), an international research center attached to the CNRS and to Sorbonne University.
The Maison Poincaré will be inaugurated on September 27 under the high patronage of the Presidency of the Republic. “Our idea is to manage to get schoolchildren and the public to dialogue with the researchers who attend our institute,” said the director of the IHP, Sylvie Benzoni, who made Cédric Villani’s project a reality.
The museum is opening “in a context where societal challenges in math are more present than ever”, added the mathematician, professor at the University Claude-Bernard Lyon 1. By reintroducing this subject in the common core in high school, “the ministry has taken note that this is a societal issue” since “too few students are moving towards scientific careers”.
The museum is aimed at all audiences from the 4th, which corresponds roughly to the “minimum theoretical level of the general population”, according to Sylvie Benzoni. “We want to contribute to increasing the general level of mathematical culture in France, which is quite modest or even low,” she added to defend this beautiful idea of the birth of a museum dedicated to mathematical sciences.
The Maison Poincaré wants to present a “living subject, in connection with society”, with the help of mediation workshops with schoolchildren. The permanent exhibition spaces are characterized by verbs (connect, become, invent, model, share, visualize) to “show the math in action”. And provide an “unexpected experience” of math to “see, hear and touch them”, through videos, games, manipulations and audio devices, explains the IHP.
Like this auditory experience of immersion in mathematical language with a “formula whisperer”, the presentation of a collection of geometric objects that Man Ray had photographed in the 1930s, or a sculpture of the great Rulpidon, a form spherical which makes it possible to illustrate the theorem of the nine colors. A space will present the great figures of mathematics of today and yesterday, such as Jean Perrin (Nobel Prize in Physics 1926), whose historic office can be visited.
