Pierre Laszlo
Biographic Data
| ID | 400792 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pierre Laszlo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pierre |
| FAMILY NAME | Laszlo |
| SIGNATURE | LASZLO P |
| AFFILIATIONS | École Polytechnique |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4334-771X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Le témoignage d’un professeur
Être un scientifique, c'est apprendre à traduire la parole des choses
Aujourd’hui, les scientifiques sont au moins trilingues : langue maternelle ; langage technique de la discipline ; anglais comme langue véhiculaire. Le plurilinguisme est indispensable à un scientifique parce que la science est inséparable de sa communication, sous ses différents registres, notamment ceux de l’écrit et de l’oral. Il n’est pas de science, en particulier, sans vulgarisation scientifique : en ce sens, être un scientifique, c’est app…
Emotions and cognitions
This essay samples contemporary scientific poetry, and finds it delightful, lavish with gems great and small, if somewhat narrow in the range of topics it tackles. Some thoughts on opacity and opaqueness and on reading poetry are followed by discussion of two recent anthologies, A Quark for Mister Mark and Songs from Unsung Worlds, and by particular consideration of the work of Charles Simic, Diane Ackerman and Roald Hoffmann
Unfortunate trends in the popularisation of science
A panorama of books on science for the general public is dismal. It shows a landscape grey and flat, monotonous, with repetitious features looking all the same. Formulaic and regurgitative writing has become the norm. Only a few areas of science are deemed worthwhile. Yet the public is thirsty for a taste of knowledge in the making, even for erudition. Some authors continue to create original and magnificent texts. Thus there is hope for the pres…
Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted
Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted Pierre Laszlo (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus "You do too much!" "Where do you find the time to write so much?" Such are the frequent refrains of my family and friends. So is it paradoxical to willingly agree to contribute a text on overload, being myself so much overloaded? An expert on the subject, admittedly. Perhaps analyzing this syndrome will help me to exorcise it, and thereby to distance it, simply by…
Benjamin Lee Whorf: Once a chemist
Pictures of science
The apparently minor art of scientific illustration raises questions that bear directly on the 'two cultures' confrontation of art and science. A marked shift in approach is discerned at the beginning of the twentieth century, from the incorporation of illustrations within the text to the use of 'enframed' figures, often with captions, as a separate entity. It is proposed that this change, which appears to have coincided with the introduction of …
Pictures of science
Natural Substances and Artificial Products
One of the defining features of the modern age is the apotheosis of natural history. Natural History is, of course, the title of Buffon's monumental work, written in the second half of the 18th century. Also, until the rise of the Industrial Revolution, natural history provided an integrated technology, stretching from the voyages of discovery to the establishment of colonies devoted to the cultivation of the resources discovered there, whether o…
In Praise of the Impure
I AM A SCIENTIST BY PROFESSION. Nature, as I observe it-the whirl of phenomena to be understood, interpreted and transferred-is the world of chemical transformations. This has made me familiar with model-building for data analysis. I would like to focus here on levels of representation.1 It is a trite observation indeed that one can formulate quite a few representations for any given phenomenon. Furthermore, and as a rule, these schema (often ico…
A Scientific Look Imbues Paintings with more Logic
A Scientific Look Imbues Paintings with more Logic
Science as Writing, or Science as Reading
"La Lecon de choses", or Lessons from Things
For a long time after the equinox tempest, the sea remains unsettled and thundery. It rolls within its waves some greenish fodder torn from the deep bottom. At the very time when the flow changes voice and starts pulling out, one can see the agile farmers rush in, each flourishing a long-toothed rake, like a hand made of wood. They each watch for the split second in which to harpoon a whole mass of algae, and to haul it back, running, often overt…
Cristallisation et recristallisation
Crystallization and recrystallization. To depict a budding love Stendhal in "De l'Amour" introduces a crystallisation metaphor. The image is from a twig abandoned in the depths of a salt mine and recovered adorned with a myriad of sparkling crystals. This essay places this analogy at the confluence of the chemical science contemporary with Stendhal, and of a Literary tradition that nurtured mythical properties of crystals, such as their purity, o…
Death is the mother of beauty. Mind, metaphor, criticsm
Representation in Chemistry
Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise int…
Conter le rêve
La déraison en images
Production d'energie romanesque: La Peau de chagrin
Apres avoir ecrit La Peau de chagrin, 1 Balzac exulte. II signe son livre Honore de Balzac, c'est la premiere fois. II y joint une preface, un texte polyvalent, triomphaliste. Balzac s'y amuse, provoque le lecteur, lance des conjectures au sujet de l'auteur et de sa personnalite. II se reclame, entre autres, de Rabelais, Walter Scott, Maturin, Perrault. Balzac en profite pour revendiquer aussi La Physiologie du mariage, publiee sous l'anonymat. C…
Representation in Chemistry
Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise int…
Production d'energie romanesque: La Peau de chagrin
Apres avoir ecrit La Peau de chagrin, 1 Balzac exulte. II signe son livre Honore de Balzac, c'est la premiere fois. II y joint une preface, un texte polyvalent, triomphaliste. Balzac s'y amuse, provoque le lecteur, lance des conjectures au sujet de l'auteur et de sa personnalite. II se reclame, entre autres, de Rabelais, Walter Scott, Maturin, Perrault. Balzac en profite pour revendiquer aussi La Physiologie du mariage, publiee sous l'anonymat. C…
La déraison en images
Conter le rêve
Death is the mother of beauty. Mind, metaphor, criticsm
Representation in Chemistry
Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise int…
Cristallisation et recristallisation
Crystallization and recrystallization. To depict a budding love Stendhal in "De l'Amour" introduces a crystallisation metaphor. The image is from a twig abandoned in the depths of a salt mine and recovered adorned with a myriad of sparkling crystals. This essay places this analogy at the confluence of the chemical science contemporary with Stendhal, and of a Literary tradition that nurtured mythical properties of crystals, such as their purity, o…
"La Lecon de choses", or Lessons from Things
For a long time after the equinox tempest, the sea remains unsettled and thundery. It rolls within its waves some greenish fodder torn from the deep bottom. At the very time when the flow changes voice and starts pulling out, one can see the agile farmers rush in, each flourishing a long-toothed rake, like a hand made of wood. They each watch for the split second in which to harpoon a whole mass of algae, and to haul it back, running, often overt…
A Scientific Look Imbues Paintings with more Logic
A Scientific Look Imbues Paintings with more Logic
Science as Writing, or Science as Reading
Pictures of science
Natural Substances and Artificial Products
One of the defining features of the modern age is the apotheosis of natural history. Natural History is, of course, the title of Buffon's monumental work, written in the second half of the 18th century. Also, until the rise of the Industrial Revolution, natural history provided an integrated technology, stretching from the voyages of discovery to the establishment of colonies devoted to the cultivation of the resources discovered there, whether o…
In Praise of the Impure
I AM A SCIENTIST BY PROFESSION. Nature, as I observe it-the whirl of phenomena to be understood, interpreted and transferred-is the world of chemical transformations. This has made me familiar with model-building for data analysis. I would like to focus here on levels of representation.1 It is a trite observation indeed that one can formulate quite a few representations for any given phenomenon. Furthermore, and as a rule, these schema (often ico…
Pictures of science
The apparently minor art of scientific illustration raises questions that bear directly on the 'two cultures' confrontation of art and science. A marked shift in approach is discerned at the beginning of the twentieth century, from the incorporation of illustrations within the text to the use of 'enframed' figures, often with captions, as a separate entity. It is proposed that this change, which appears to have coincided with the introduction of …
Benjamin Lee Whorf: Once a chemist
Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted
Nothing Added, Nothing Subtracted Pierre Laszlo (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus "You do too much!" "Where do you find the time to write so much?" Such are the frequent refrains of my family and friends. So is it paradoxical to willingly agree to contribute a text on overload, being myself so much overloaded? An expert on the subject, admittedly. Perhaps analyzing this syndrome will help me to exorcise it, and thereby to distance it, simply by…
Emotions and cognitions
This essay samples contemporary scientific poetry, and finds it delightful, lavish with gems great and small, if somewhat narrow in the range of topics it tackles. Some thoughts on opacity and opaqueness and on reading poetry are followed by discussion of two recent anthologies, A Quark for Mister Mark and Songs from Unsung Worlds, and by particular consideration of the work of Charles Simic, Diane Ackerman and Roald Hoffmann
Unfortunate trends in the popularisation of science
A panorama of books on science for the general public is dismal. It shows a landscape grey and flat, monotonous, with repetitious features looking all the same. Formulaic and regurgitative writing has become the norm. Only a few areas of science are deemed worthwhile. Yet the public is thirsty for a taste of knowledge in the making, even for erudition. Some authors continue to create original and magnificent texts. Thus there is hope for the pres…
Être un scientifique, c'est apprendre à traduire la parole des choses
Aujourd’hui, les scientifiques sont au moins trilingues : langue maternelle ; langage technique de la discipline ; anglais comme langue véhiculaire. Le plurilinguisme est indispensable à un scientifique parce que la science est inséparable de sa communication, sous ses différents registres, notamment ceux de l’écrit et de l’oral. Il n’est pas de science, en particulier, sans vulgarisation scientifique : en ce sens, être un scientifique, c’est app…
Le témoignage d’un professeur
Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Art history (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Chemistry (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works)