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:
“Eloquence, which persuades by sweetness, not by authority—as a tyrant, not as a king.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there. For there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“I had a chair at every hearth,
When no one turned to see,
With ‘Look at that old fellow there,
‘And who may he be?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)