Alternative model: French mathematicians don’t overperform in an objective sense. Rather, French mathematicians happened to end up disproportionately setting fashion trends in pure mathematics for a while, for reasons which are mostly just signalling games and academic politics rather than mathematical merit.
The Bourbaki spring to mind here as a central example.
Fwiw, the French dominance isn’t confined to Bourbakist topics. E.g. Pierre Louis Lions won one of the French medals and is the world most cited mathematician, with a speciality in PDEs. Some of his work investigates the notion of general nonsmooth (“viscosity”) solutions for the general Hamilton-Jacobi(-Bellmann) equation both numerically and analytically. It’s based on a vast generalization of the subgradient calculus (“nonsmooth” calculus), and is very directly related to good numerical approximation schemes.
Alternative model: French mathematicians don’t overperform in an objective sense. Rather, French mathematicians happened to end up disproportionately setting fashion trends in pure mathematics for a while, for reasons which are mostly just signalling games and academic politics rather than mathematical merit.
The Bourbaki spring to mind here as a central example.
Sure happy to disagree on this one.
Fwiw, the French dominance isn’t confined to Bourbakist topics. E.g. Pierre Louis Lions won one of the French medals and is the world most cited mathematician, with a speciality in PDEs. Some of his work investigates the notion of general nonsmooth (“viscosity”) solutions for the general Hamilton-Jacobi(-Bellmann) equation both numerically and analytically. It’s based on a vast generalization of the subgradient calculus (“nonsmooth” calculus), and is very directly related to good numerical approximation schemes.