Second edition of the Polymath Summer School at École Polytechnique

About ten students nearing the end of their second year in the Bachelor of Science program (class of BX27) gathered from June 15 to 26 in a relaxed, summery setting, under the guidance of Guillaume Dubach, a Monge Professor at École Polytechnique and a member of the Laurent Schwartz Center for Mathematics (CMLS*), for a new summer school in mathematics.

This event, whose format was adapted to account for the unusual heat wave during the last weeks of June, consisted of lectures in the morning, followed by games and small-group discussions in the afternoon, with the aim of offering students a fun, intuitive, and collaborative introduction to mathematical research.

Seated in the shade of a large blue cedar tree near Lac de l'École, participants were able to benefit from lectures by experts in various fields: introductions to measure theory with Aniss Fares (Ph.D. student at CMLS), to random processes with Jérémie Bettinelli (CNRS, LIX), and to infinite-dimensional operators with Charlotte Dietze (CNRS, Sorbonne University), to conclude with an overview of the interactions between mathematics and artificial intelligence presented by Thomas Hannagan (Stellantis), a specialist in the study of neural networks.

The summer school ended on Friday, June 26, with the MEGA (Matrices and Random Graphs) seminar—a full-fledged research seminar held at the CMLS—to which the students were invited, and whose presentations were related to topics covered during the two weeks of the summer school.

The first edition of this summer school, proposed in 2025 by Guillaume Dubach, received support for its launch from École Polytechnique’s “Dynamiques Pédagogiques” Fund, which aims to encourage educational innovation by supporting faculty initiatives.

This fund, financed through the generosity of donors to the École Polytechnique Foundation as part of the “Serving Science” campaign, is made available throughout the year with support from the School’s Teaching and Learning Center’s instructional designers for implementation or pedagogical reflection.

* CMLS: a joint research unit CNRS - École Polytechnique – Institut Polytechnique de Paris

**Lix : a joint research unit CNRS - École Polytechnique – Institut Polytechnique de Paris