Nicolas Bouleau

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.

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 and by Dominique Bourg in Science et prudence . 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

Selected bibliography

Books in English

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

Philosophy of sciences

Cinq conférences sur l'indécidabilité, coll. with J-Y. Girard and A. Louveau, Presses de l'École des Ponts, 1983. 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, , rééd. Spartacus IDH, 2015. Introduction à la philosophie des sciences, Spartacus IDH, 2017.

Essays

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