Maison Poincaré

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Math Museum
Maison Poincaré
City Paris
Country France
Opening year 2023
Exhibition surface 2 000 m2 (total), 900 m2 (exhibition space)
N. of exhibits
N. of visitors (yearly)
Address 11 Rue Pierre et Marie Curie
75005 Paris (France)
Web https://maison-des-maths.paris/

The Maison Poincaré is a math museum located in Paris, France. The museum is affiliated with the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP), and it is located in the old Physical Chemistry laboratory (Jean Perrin building), which is located in front of the IHP headquarters inside the Pierre et Marie Curie University campus in Paris city center. It has a quite unique proposal of a public exhibition space integrated into a research ambient, which offers the visitor a sneak peek into the life of contemporary mathematicians. The museum was inaugurated on September 27th, 2023.

Areas of the museum

The space is divided into sections with an action verb as topic (connect, become, share, invent, model, visualize, breath), each one with a different expositive technique.

  • The “model” space has interactive exhibits (audio spectrogram, double pendulum, fluid simulations…)
  • The “connect” space is a mural with a string graph representing different areas of mathematics. It serves also as the introduction to the museum.visu
  • The “become” space has short biographies of mathematicians, the “share” space has feelings on what it means to think as a mathematician (a pictures-and-audio book with mathematician’s * experiences, a reader/translator math-formulae-to-English/French, some of the famous 19th century plaster surfaces…)
  • The “invent” space is the lecture hall, with some references to famous mathematicians (Mirzakhami, Ramanujan, Noether… also collectives such as Burbaki).
  • The “visualize” space is an empty room where the Holo-Math workshops take place. Holo-Math is a mixed reality show using Microsoft's HoloLens.
  • The “breath” space is the garden, with a math sculpture.

Aside from the permanent exhibition described above, there is a hall for a temporary exhibition. Exhibitions on this space are prepared and will tour between the Maison de la Mathématique et la Informatique (Lyon) and the forthcoming Fermat museum (Beaumont-de-Lomagne, near Toulouse). At the inauguration time, the temporary exhibition is “Get into the world of AI”.

Conception

The Maison Poincaré is a museum of mathematics open to the public, but it is also integrated into research facilities. The Maison Poincaré sits next to the Institut Henri Poincaré, a research center, it is inside a university campus, and the Perrin building where it is located also hosts lectures and conferences. The idea of integrating a museum of mathematics into the heart of IHP came from its former director, the mathematician Cédric Villani. The novel idea is that visiting mathematicians will walk casually around the museum space in their way to lectures, while visiting public will see “real math formulae in chalk over blackboard” and get a glimpse of the academic life of mathematicians as part of their visit experience. Hence, the Maison Poincaré aims to be a convivial place of exchange of ideas, an interdisciplinary meeting point for researchers and academics, and a link between mathematics, the general public, and society.

It must be noted that Maison Poincaré is not a museum conceived for children. While there are some exhibits that can be used and may be interesting for children (< 10 years old), the overall discourse and planning is for a more mature audience, officially intended for students at lycée age (15-18 y.o.) and adults. The Maison Poincaré is a museum made by researchers with the taste of researchers. Aside from some interactive exhibits displaying mathematical ideas or their applications (sound analysis, compression of files, simulation of fluid motion...), a big part of the exhibition is devoted to reflections about mathematics and its community. We can find many biographies and honorific portraits of modern and contemporary mathematicians, the heroes of the mathematical community. We can also find a lot of emphasis on “how a mathematician thinks”, “how a mathematician shares his/her findings”, “how mathematicians have lectures”, “how mathematicians are awarded”… Certainly, Maison Poincaré is a museum that will appeal to mathematicians and researchers, which is also a substantial part of the intended public. On the other hand, the non-mathematicians visiting the exhibition will get a unique view of what looks like the (professional) life of those who devote their lives to mathematics.

References