Biography
Courtillot is an engineer from the École nationale supérieure des Mines de Paris. He then studied at Stanford University. In 1974, he was awarded a doctorate by University Paris 6 and in 1977 a state doctorate by University Paris 7.
He has pursued an academic career in France and the United States, including teaching stints at Caltech and the University of Minnesota, and work with the European Geosciences Union, the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (where he has been director since 2004), and the Ministry of National Education in France. (From 1998 to 2001 Courtillot served under Claude Allègre as director of research when Allègre was Minister for National Education, Research and Technology.) Courtillot is currently Professor of Geophysics at the Paris Diderot University. He has published in excess of 150 papers in scientific journals, with some emphasis on the specialty of paleomagnetism; he has served as editorial advisor to the French journal La Recherche.
Vincent Courtillot was elected to membership in the French Academy of Sciences in November 2003.
Read more about this topic: Vincent Courtillot
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)