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François Le Lionnais and the Oulipo. (English) Zbl 1451.00072

Emmer, Michele (ed.) et al., Imagine math 7. Between culture and mathematics. Proceedings of the international conference on mathematics and culture, Venice, Italy, March 29–31, 2019. Cham: Springer. 383-408 (2020).
Summary: “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry” (Bertrand Russel, Mysticism and Logic, 1910). This sentence, quoted by F. Le Lionnais (ed.) in his work “La beauté en mathématiques” in [Les grands courants de la pensée mathématique. Avec un avant-propos de Jean Ballard et une lettre inédite de Paul Valéry. Préface de Bernard Teissier. Paris: Hermann (1998; Zbl 0936.00003)], reflects his conception of a deep bond between mathematics and literature. He had a multifaceted education and was an erudite and founder of the Oulipo with Raymond Queneau. Even though he was neither a ‘professional’ mathematician nor a ‘professional’ man of letters but only an épicurien passionné as he defined himself [“Un certain disparate”, Interview with F. Le Lionnais, https://blogs.oulipo.net/fll/ (1976)], while alive, he channelled his interests in the theorisation of the so-called littérature potentielle (potential literature) “pour exciter les curieux d’insolite et faire réfléchir les passionnés de littérature aussi bien que le fanatiques de mathématiques” [F. Le Lionnais and R. Queneau, “Qu’est-ce que l’Oulipo?”, L’Education 209, 24–28 (1974)]. The purpose of this chapter is outline the figure of François Le Lionnais (who we will refer to from here on as FLL as he himself liked to do [O. Salon and F. Le Lionnais, “Visionnaire et pédagogue discret”, Nouv. d’Archiméde 50, 35–39 (2009)]) through the analysis of his most meaningful works, which, in the current literature, appear as subordinated to the works of the more famous and researched Queneau.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1454.00058].

MSC:

00A64 Mathematics and literature

Biographic References:

Le Lionnais, François; Oulipo

Citations:

Zbl 0936.00003
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Full Text: DOI

References:

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