31–40 of 51 posts
What arrogance and ignorance. France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA and other institutions...
> France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique Is EP’s productivity (in terms of companies founded by, landmark inventions/discoveries made by or patents awarded to) comparable to MIT? I thought it was more geared towards producing future politicians.
What! The land that gave the world Fourier, Poincare, Galois, Laplace, Pascal, Lagrange, Cauchy, Descartes, Fermat, Hadamard, Borel ... they had their MIT a long time earlier.
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical…
Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.
What! The land that gave the world Fourier, Poincare, Galois, Laplace, Pascal, Lagrange, Cauchy, Descartes, Fermat, Hadamard, Borel ... they had their MIT a long time earlier.
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical…
I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French.
With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources.
Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.
It can't, it shouldn't and it definitely does not have to. France is doing just fine in terms of research in many fields. Those that would like France to produce an 'MIT' would also like Europe to produce the next Facebook and neither is going to happen. But that doesn't mean things are bad, they're just different and no less valuable.
Out of curiosity, why is this true? Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American, yet I see tons of talented European developers and conferences all the time? Are Euro nations just hostile to startups in a way the US isn't?
What are the advantages to starting a startup in France vs joining an established company?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical…
> And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French. With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount…
What arrogance and ignorance. France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA and other institutions...
This is in no way arrogance. France has a history of long-time academics that are totally inactive but take up a faculty line for decades. This means a lot of the research is just well behind the times.
On top of it all most of the research gets published in 3rd tier or worse places. Often it gets published in no-name workshops or journals in French.
It's so bad a student cannot get a non-pity PhD at MIT by publishing in the venues where most of the papers from EP (and to a somewhat lesser extent INRIA) go to.
If you think EP is anywhere like say.. any of the top 10 institutions in the US/Canada/UK you're ignoring the facts. They're even falling behind China now and will in a decade or two be behind institutions in India too if they keep going like this.
For example. EP has basically no presence in AI or robotics at any major conference. Most faculty members in EP don't publish 1 paper every year in a reputable conference or journal.
INRIA is more international, they suffer somewhat less from these problems. They're also half the size of MIT at best and heavily skewed toward fields that aren't hot anymore.
What arrogance and ignorance. France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA and other institutions...
My answer is mostly with respect to CS which I know best, although it does apply to other fields. This is in no way arrogance. France has a history of long-time academics that are totally inactive but take up a faculty line for decades. This means a lot of the research is just well behind the times. On top of it all most of the research gets published in 3rd tier or worse places. Often it gets published in no-name wo…
Just look below. Neither INRIA nor EP are in the top 30 institutions with publications at ICML and only INRIA is in the top 50 (at 14, not bad!) at NIPS. EP isn't in the top 50 institutions with papers at NIPS.
https://medium.com/@karpathy/icml-accepted-papers-institutio...
https://medium.com/machine-learning-in-practice/nips-accepte...
EP isn't a player in academic CS basically. (the numbers work out to be the same if you attend CVPR or ICRA or any number of other conferences).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique Is EP’s productivity (in terms of companies founded by, landmark inventions/discoveries made by or patents awarded to) comparable to MIT? I thought it was more geared towards producing future politicians.
Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-st...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supéri...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical…
> Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.