François Le Lionnais

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François Le Lionnais (born October 3, 1901 in Paris , † March 13, 1984 in Boulogne-Billancourt ) was a French writer, science journalist and publisher. Among other things, he published popular science books on mathematics and chess.

Life

Le Lionnais was initially a chemical engineer, but published books on chess as early as the 1930s. During the Second World War he was in the Resistance in Lyon from 1942 ( Marco Polo network ), was arrested and tortured and from April 1944 was deported to the Dora camp in the Harz Mountains , where the prisoners had to work on the V2. In the camp he set up a camp university ( École Supérieure de Guerre ). Shortly before the end of the war, he managed to escape.

After the war he worked in France in a leading position in the popularization of the sciences. In the early 1950s he became head of the Department of Education and Dissemination of Sciences (Enseignement et Diffusion des Sciences) at UNESCO in Paris (whose Prix Kalinga Prize for Popularization of Sciences he created in 1952 with Jacques Bergier ) and founded with Louis de Broglie and his close friend Jacques Bergier the association of science authors in France (Association des Écrivains Scientifiques de France), of which he was the first president. He was on the committee of the Académie des sciences for scientific language and on the committee for the restoration of works of art in the French national museums.

In the 1960s he had a regular popular science broadcast (La science en marche) on the radio at France Culture and was on the science committee of Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF). Le Lionnais also had connections to many artists, writers and musicians. In his early years he frequented surrealist circles (he was close to the Dada movement and was acquainted with Max Jacob ) and was later a member of the Pataphysicists . With Raymond Queneau he founded the Oulipo (OuLiPo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potential) in 1960, which wanted to publish a new kind of literature in a wide variety of fields. The graph theorist Claude Berge , Italo Calvino , Georges Perec , and Jacques Roubaud published there . Le Lionnais was the president of Oulipo until his death.

His publications on mathematics include a book on remarkable numbers, a mathematics lexicon (which in particular shows links to other cultural areas) and the anthology The great currents of mathematics from 1948, in which leading Bourbaists ( André Weil , Jean Dieudonné ) also wrote their then novel structural conception of mathematics set out, among other well-known mathematicians such as Paul Montel , Georges Valiron , Élie Cartan and authors such as the architect Le Corbusier and Raymond Queneau.

He owned a private library of over 30,000 volumes.

Le Lionnais received the Croix de guerre with palm trees, the Médaille de la Résistance with rosette and was commander of the Legion of Honor .

Fonts

Popular science books:

  • La Science en marche , 2 volumes, Les Yeux Ouverts, 1962 (based on his radio broadcasts):
    • Volume 1 La Prévision du temps (with J. Bessemoulin, R. Clausse, l. Facy, A. Viaut)
    • Volume 2 L'Éclairagisme: lumière et couleur (with Mme Jonckeere, Maurice Déribéré, Y. Le Grand, J. Maisonneuve)
  • Editor and co-author Cinquante années de découvertes, bilan 1900 - 1950 , Seuil 1950.

Mathematics:

  • Les Nombres remarquables , Hermann 1983.
  • Published by Les Grands Courants de la pensée mathématique , Cahiers du Sud. 1948, reprint Hermann 2007
  • with A. Bouvier, M. George Dictionnaire des Mathématiques , PUF 1979
  • Translator with Francine Béris (pseudonym of Francine Bloch ) by Edward Kasner , James Newman (editor) Les Mathématiques et l'Imagination , Paris, Payot, 1950 (Original Mathematics and the imagination ).

literature

  • LiPo (1st Manifeste de l'OuLiPo) , Gallimard 1963
  • 2. Manifeste de l'Oulipo , Gallimard 1973
  • 3. Manifeste de l'Oulipo , Bibliothèque Oulipienne n ° 30.
  • Un Certain Disparate , Bibliothèque Oulipienne n ° 85, published in full by Oulipo 2011
  • Lewis Carroll précurseur de l'OU.LI.PO , Ed . Henri Veyrier, 1978

Painting:

  • Magnelli , Galerie de France, 1960.
  • La Peinture à Dora , L'Échoppe, 1999 (pictures taken in Dora concentration camp, first published in 1946).

Books about chess:

  • L'Ouverture française 1 e4-e6 , Éditions des Cahiers de l'Échiquier Français, 1935
  • Le Jardin des échecs , Éditions des Cahiers de l'Échiquier Français, 1936.
  • Les Prix de beauté aux échecs , Payot, 1939, 2nd edition 1951, 3rd edition, 2002
  • Le Jeu d'échecs , Que Sais-je series , PUF, 1957, 1974.
  • with Ernst Paget Dictionnaire des échecs , PUF1967; deuxième édition en 1974
  • Tempête sur l'échiquier , Belin, 1981
  • Marcel Duchamp joueur d'échecs , L'Échoppe, 1997

Otherwise:

  • Le Temps , Ed. Robert Delpire, 1959

literature

  • Olivier Salon François Le Lionnais, visionnaire et pédagogue discret , Les Nouvelles d'Archimède, no.50 , January 2009
  • Olivier Salon: Le disparate François Le Lionnais: tentative de recollement d'un puzzle biographique , Paris: Le Nouvel Attila, [2016], ISBN 979-10-95244-06-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Le Lionnais speaks about this time in Colonel Rémy Autour de la plage Bonaparte , Librairie académique Perrin, 1970. He also appears in the memoirs of Maroussia Naïtchenko, Une jeune fille en guerre, Imago, 2003
personal data
SURNAME Le Lionnais, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, science journalist and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1984
Place of death Boulogne-Billancourt