Blaise Pascal Chair

The Blaise Pascal Chair, (Chaires Internationales de Recherche Blaise Pascal, France), established in 1996 by the Government of the Île-de-France Region for internationally acclaimed foreign scientists in all disciplines. A scientific committee annually selects the most outstanding candidates from all over the world. Since its inception a number of famous scientists were the Blaise Pascal Chair laureates: Gérard Debreu (UC Berkeley, 1983 Nobel Prize in Economics), Ahmed Zewail (Caltech, 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Igor Mel'čuk (University of Montreal, the world leading researcher in linguistics), George Smoot (LBL, 2006 Nobel Prize in experimental Astrophysics), Robert Langlands (UBC, 1996 Wolf Prize, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century), outstanding theoretical physicists Gabriele Veneziano (CERN/College de France), Alexander Zamolodchikov (Rutgers), and others.

Famous quotes containing the words blaise pascal, pascal and/or chair:

    I have only made this [letter] longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
    Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

    Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.
    —Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

    Come leave the loathed stage,
    And the more loathsome age,
    Where pride and impudence in faction knit
    Usurp the chair of wit:
    Indicting and arraigning every day,
    Something they call a play.
    Let their fastidious, vain
    Commission of the brain,
    Run on and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn:
    They were not made for thee, less thou for them.
    Ben Jonson (1572–1637)