Mathematics
"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty."
— Bertrand Russell
I have a deep interest in geometry and analysis, and I want to spend my life doing pure mathematics. The long-term aim is to be a research mathematician — somewhere between differential geometry and the more philosophical end of mathematical physics.
My way into mathematics has unfolded in three rough chapters — each one changed the way I think and read.
Chapter 1. Discovery.
I grew up in the Clos-des-Roses in Compiègne. Math wasn't a household subject — it was something I picked up at school and then kept picking up, because it was the one place where being stubborn paid off. I read everything I could find, mostly in the library. By the time I started lycée I knew I wanted to do this seriously, but I didn't yet know what "seriously" meant.
Chapter 2. Contests.
Once at Lycée Arago in Perpignan I started training for olympiads in earnest. The list piled up over a single year: a perfect 25/25 on the first round of the Olympiade française, Honorable Mention at the Canadian Lynx, High Distinction at the Australian Math Competition, top-2 at the Penn Math Contest, top-9 internationally on the Caltech CMM Power Round, top-17 at PUMaC, silver at the COMC with the CMO cutoff cleared. Then 145.5/150 on the AMC 12A and a perfect 15/15 on AIME II, which cleared the USAMO cutoff. That run got me admitted to Stanford SUMaC for summer 2026 on a $9,000 scholarship — and a feature in Oise Hebdo on the kid from the Clos-des-Roses going to Stanford.
Chapter 3. Research.
Contests teach you speed and stubbornness, but they aren't the work. Two summers ago I did an applied maths internship at UTC with Prof. El Hajj, on PDEs for dislocations in metallic alloys and topologically-optimised energy storage — my first taste of real, slow mathematics. Since then I've been working with Prof. Vincent Robin on the free-will theorem of Conway and Kochen, in particular an alternative proof of their geometric lemma using rotations of the cube and group actions on Peres directions. Alongside that, a directed reading project at AMMOC on differential geometry with Yaashaa Golovanov, and Saturday sessions at Parimaths run by students from the ENS Ulm — algebraic topology, Galois theory, measure theory, Fourier analysis.
Today I find that contests and research pull me in different directions, and I like that — the first rewards the joy of a quick, clean idea, the second rewards sitting with something for months. Together, they're shaping me into whatever kind of mathematician I'm going to become.
For details see Research, Teaching, and Conferences attended.