University of Paris alumni

Henri_B._Kagan

Henri Boris Kagan (born 15 December 1930) is currently an emeritus professor at the Université Paris-Sud in France. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of asymmetric catalysis. His discoveries have had far-reaching impacts on the pharmaceutical industry.He graduated from the Sorbonne and École nationale supérieure de chimie de Paris and carried out his PhD under J. Jacques at the Collège de France. Subsequently, he was a research associate with A. Horeau. He then moved to Université Paris-Sud, Orsay where he is emeritus professor. A landmark in his research was the development of C2-symmetric ligands, e.g., DIOP for asymmetric catalysis. This discovery led to the discovery of many related ligands that support catalysts used in a variety of practical applications.

Anne_Sinclair

Anne Sinclair (French pronunciation: [an sɛ̃ˈklɛʁ], born Anne-Élise Schwartz; 15 July 1948) is a French-American television and radio interviewer. She hosted one of the most popular political shows for more than thirteen years on TF1, the largest European private TV channel. She is heiress to much of the fortune of her maternal grandfather, art dealer Paul Rosenberg. She covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and the French TV channel Canal+. She married French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 1991 and divorced him in 2013 in the aftermath of the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. She was portrayed in the 2014 feature film Welcome to New York.

Anatole_Le_Braz

Anatole le Braz, the "Bard of Brittany" (2 April 1859 – 20 March 1926), was a Breton poet, folklore collector, and translator. He was highly regarded amongst both European and American scholars, and was known for his warmth and charm.

Valérie_Trierweiler

Valérie Trierweiler (French pronunciation: [valeʁi tʁiɛʁvɛlɛːʁ]; née Massonneau; born 16 February 1965) is a French journalist and author. She has hosted political talk shows and has contributed to Paris Match. She is best known for having been the companion of the president of France, François Hollande, until January 2014.

Emmett_Williams

Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual artist Ann Noël.
Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.
As an artist and poet, Emmett Williams collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. One of his notable pieces from this period is "Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices" (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase "You just never quite know", and say their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together with the beat of a metronome: when a black circle appears on the grid, the performer speaks the word, and when no circle appears they say nothing. In the resulting performance, the core phrase "you never quite know" is overshadowed by other combinations of words, such as "you know" and "quite just".In the 1960s, Williams was the European coordinator of Fluxus and worked closely with French artist Robert Filliou, and a founding member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris, France. His work appeared in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. Williams was friends with Václav Havel during his dissident years' he translated some of Havel's work into English. Williams was a guest artist in residence teaching at Mount Holyoke College from September 1975 to June 1976.
Williams' theater essays appeared in Das Neue Forum, Berner Blatter, Ulmer Theater, and other European magazines. He translated Daniel Spoerri's Topographie Anecdotee du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), collaborated with Claes Oldenburg on Store Days, and edited An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, all published by the Something Else Press, which was owned and managed by fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s Williams was Editor in Chief of the Something Else Press.
In 1991, Williams published an autobiography, My Life in Fluxus - And Vice Versa, published by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, and reprinted the next year by Thames and Hudson.
In 1996, he was honored for his life work with the Hannah-Höch-Preis. He died in Berlin in 2007.
In 2014, Edition Zédélé published a reprint of SOLDIER (Reprint Collection, curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot), first published in A Valentine for Noel (1973) by Something Else Press and Hansjörg Mayer.

Michel_Siffre

Michel Siffre (born 3 January 1939) is a French underground explorer, adventurer and scientist. He was born in Nice, where he spent his childhood.
He received a postgraduate degree at the Sorbonne six months after completing his baccalauréat. He founded the French Institute of Speleology (Institut français de spéléologie) in 1962 (not to be confused with the French Federation of Speleology).
Inspired by the space race, he explored how humans experience time by spending two months cloistered in the abyss of Scarasson (Punta Marguareis) without time cues on a glacier, from July 1962. He then organized several similar underground experiments for other speleologists. In 1972, Siffre went back underground for a six-month stay in a cave in Texas. He found that without time cues, several people including himself adjusted to a 48-hour rather than a 24-hour cycle. The notes of his experiments were used by NASA. Several astronauts reported experiences similar to those experienced in underground experiments such as loss of short-term memory to being isolated from external time references.