225 years contributing to scientific progress

Over 225 years, École Polytechnique has formed a community of students, alumni, professors, lecturers and researchers who have constantly pushed back the boundaries of knowledge, science and understanding of the world. Eminent Polytechniciens include Sophie Germain and her work on number theory, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac and his fundamental advances in chemistry, Gaspard Coriolis, who gave his name to the Coriolis force, Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity and in 1903 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics with Marie and Pierre Curie, and Henri Poincaré who was a forerunner in the fields of special relativity developed by Einstein and of chaos theory. More recently, in 1988 Maurice Allais's work on the optimum allocation of resources earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics, the same Prize being awarded to Jean Tirole in 2014 for his work on market regulation. We owe to Benoit Mandelbrot the invention of fractals and to Rose Dieng-Kuntz her seminal work on semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence. But the researchers and professors of École Polytechnique have also left their mark, for example Gaspard Monge and his optimal transport theory, Joseph Fourier with his series and transforms used in signal processing, André-Marie Ampère, the father of electromagnetism, Louis Leprince-Ringuet and his fundamental discoveries in particle physics, and Laurent Schwartz, recipient of the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work on distribution theory, a distinction shared 44 years later by Pierre-Louis Lions, who developed the concentration-compactness principle. Finally, in October 2018, Gérard Mourou, Professor and member of the High College of École Polytechnique, received the Nobel Prize for his work on Chirped Pulse Amplification.