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Somewhat off-topic, but does anyone know the reason Inria seems to have developed such a specialisation around these types of tools? I get why you'd be there today, but is there a common link/person when that started? If so, I'd love a little nudge about where to find out more.

Edit: Thanks for responses. And a warning to others: don't start following links to advisers and students in Wikipedia, it never finishes.

3 comments

INRIA is an exceptional institution and is able to hire a lot of amazing talent. They were one the earliest public research institutions that had a separate career track for developers and technical staff.

It's truly a national gem. Researchers at INRIA are responsible for scikit-learn, coq, ocaml, etc etc.

France has a very mathy culture that emerges from institutions like the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and people like Gérard Huet, Xavier Leroy, Thierry Coquand, etc. who have been among the top scientists in that domain for a while and have aggregated teams around them.

Jean-Yves Girard is another one.

It's a national research institutions who's specialized into this sort of thing.

To caricature for US readers, you can think of it as a thousand Google PhD who have a guaranteed job for life and nothing to do but research, any research they might be interested in.

I fear I may have phrased my question poorly. I can understand why you'd gravitate toward there now, I'm more generally curious about how that specialisation came to be in the first place. Was there a specific catalyst? A person or event perhaps.

For example, from my Wikipedia trail I see Maurice Nivat come up in the adviser camp for a few of the more current names.