More than any other city on the planet, Paris is the world’s center for mathematics

A unique mathematics community has once again been confirmed and outstanding with the announcement of the 12th French winner of the Fields Medal in 2014.
A long tradition of mathematics
The century of Louis XIV was also that of Descartes, Fermat, and Pascal. At the time of the Revolution, Laplace, Lagrange, Legendre, Condorcet, d’Alembert, and Monge were the leading figures in mathematics. They, in turn, were followed by Fourier, Cauchy, Galois, Poncelet, and Chasles − a line of succession just as impressive, if less often invoked, as that linking France’s writers. We forget that at the outset of the 19th century more renowned foreign scholars arrived in Paris for its scientific culture than for its literary dazzle. By the end of the century and into the early 20th century, the capital hosted prominent personalities such as Jordan, Borel, Lebesgue, and Lévy, among others or a genius such as Poincaré, whose portrait photographed by Smith was first published in October 1889 in the American Journal of Mathematics.
The 1930’s saw the founding of the Bourbaki group, which revolutionized Mathematics, preparing the way for the prodigious expansion of the 1950’s and beyond. The reasons for that expansion are many: an increase in the theoretical research that underpins practical applications in every economic sector, in parallel with the explosion of computer science and robotics; the “mathematicization” of economic analysis; the flexibility and diversity of the system of mathematical research, which had been freed from some of the constraints of the university system by the emergence of other sources of financing; the autonomy of mathematical researchers, who are less dependent on large budgets than researchers in some other disciplines; the arrival in France of Russian mathematicians; the prestige in France of pure intellectual research; and the commitment of great mathematicians to the freedom of thought and criticism such as Alexandre Grothendieck (1928-2014), who was stateless for a long time before being made a French national in 1971 and who was trained and worked in France. Considered the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, he turned down the Fields Medal in 1966 on political grounds.
Over 4 000 mathematicians work in the academic sector in France, and around 10% are researchers in public research organizations such as the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), and the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). More...