Michèle Audin

""I have done a lot of work on the history of mathematicians living in the first half of twentieth century. I edited correspondence between André Weil and Henri Cartan. I have also written about the way the Jews were forbidden to publish in France during the German occupation. I found some correspondence between two mathematicians at the time of the occupation. One was French, a collaborationist, and the other one German, a member of the army. In their letters, they were very friendly and exchanged very pro-Nazi opinions. I hoped to publish this correspondence, but then I realized the family would never give permission.Even now, not everybody in France is willing to publicize the fact that he or she had relatives who, seventy-five years ago, collaborated with the Germans. This is one thing that led me to write the novel. When you say, “So-and-so was French and became a German collaborator,” or “this was a bad guy, and that was a good guy”—you are just making an accusation. That was quite the opposite of what I wanted to do. I wanted to have a different kind of freedom, to write something that was not academic research. I wanted to have something more—how to do I say this (very modestly!)?—something more universal. I wanted to write in a different way from a standard paper in history or mathematics and to reach different kinds of readers. Of course, the main reason was that I wanted to write a novel,"."

"It was a very natural process. When I would write mathematics, I always tried to take care to write well. I am not the kind of mathematician who uses only fifty words of vocabulary! I just like to write, and I am happy to write about mathematics or mathematicians or anything else. Fiction writing is not very different from writing mathematics. It uses the same qualities, such as imagination and rigor."

"No. Under President Hollande, the archives have been opened. But I don’t think there is anything in the archives, because this was something done secretly by the army. And it was sixty years ago"

"I have a book that appeared in 2016, called Mademoiselle Haas. There were so many men in 121 Days that I decided to write a book about women! Mademoiselle Haas is about women working in Paris in the 1930s. None of them are mathematicians—at that time there were very few women mathematicians. And I have another book that will appear in September this year, about the Paris Commune in 1871. It has nothing to do with mathematics, although there are some mathematicians in it."

"The thing I wanted to show is that numbers are exactly like words. Everybody knows that you can make words say whatever you want them to say. Numbers are the same. I wanted to say that there is nothing objective, no truth in numbers. There is a quotation of Simone de Beauvoir: “There are words as murderous as gas chambers.” After the liberation of France, there was a trial of a journalist who was a collaborator. He wrote many things against Jews, including giving addresses where people were hiding. These were just words. But there are words that are murderous. It’s just the same with numbers."