15 ms·

Can France Create Its Own MIT?

69 points by sndean 8y ago

sddfd 8y ago
France already has an excellent research system, and the phrase "create its own MIT" is ambiguous at best: This is mainly about branding to increase international visibility of the institutions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
elcomet 8y ago
CentraleSupelec is France's best attempt to match MIT (more than 1000 students each year). It was formed from the merger of Centrale Paris and Supelec schools. And it's a unique school, not like this merger: it's a reunion of several schools that want to keep their independance. I think it'll be harder for them to act in coordination to achieve their goals.
gtycomb 8y ago
What! The land that gave the world Fourier, Poincare, Galois, Laplace, Pascal, Lagrange, Cauchy, Descartes, Fermat, Hadamard, Borel ... they had their MIT a long time earlier.
- adventured 8y ago
  Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical matters related to the present.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    > Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.
    - tnecniv 8y ago
      A Greek professor told me that when he started his PhD (in the US) his Greek advisor told him as a Greek in America his two options were to become a control theorist or open a diner.
  - another-one-off 8y ago
    > And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French. With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources. Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.
    - ggg9990 8y ago
      Not really, because raw land is valuable for three things: agriculture, real estate, and natural resource extraction, and the first two are virtually worthless in deserts which is most of Australia’s land.
- obscurantist 8y ago
  Excuse me, but Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia was Italian.
coldtea 8y ago
What arrogance and ignorance. France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA and other institutions...
- ggg9990 8y ago
  The difference is that MIT draws on the world population whereas Ecole Polytechnique draws on the Francophone population.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    That's their decision, and serves their purposes.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique Is EP’s productivity (in terms of companies founded by, landmark inventions/discoveries made by or patents awarded to) comparable to MIT? I thought it was more geared towards producing future politicians.
  - da-bacon 8y ago
    Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-start-1.20757 https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-st...
    - sytelus 8y ago
      This is a good measure: divide number of Nobel winners by total student population. By that standard, EP seems to be top ranked. The problem is that the last EP student who won the prize was enrolled in 1960s. Many other winners were all the wY back in 1800s. It seems that EP was one of the best institute before WW II but then something happened and things went downhill. This could be great case study. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieure_people#Nobel_laureates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supéri...
jacquesm 8y ago
It can't, it shouldn't and it definitely does not have to. France is doing just fine in terms of research in many fields. Those that would like France to produce an 'MIT' would also like Europe to produce the next Facebook and neither is going to happen. But that doesn't mean things are bad, they're just different and no less valuable.
- nickpeterson 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, why is this true? Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American, yet I see tons of talented European developers and conferences all the time? Are Euro nations just hostile to startups in a way the US isn't?
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    I'm not sure - but it's clear that having talented developers is not sufficient. What are the advantages to starting a startup in France vs joining an established company?
    - hedora 8y ago
      This is a cynical take, but, roughly speaking, in Europe, there are workers rights, and in the US, employment is at-will. The US systems tilts the scales toward stronger employees. So, the more marketable your skills are, the more incentive you have to move to SV. A slightly less offensive take on the situation is that, if you stay in Europe, you won’t be destitute, but you won’t get rich either. However, note that there are many articles on HN that attempt to quantify this effect by looking at economic mobility. The consensus is that Europe is becoming more of a meritocracy and in the US, economic status is increasingly determined at birth.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        > The consensus is that Europe is becoming more of a meritocracy and in the US, economic status is increasingly determined at birth. Poor Americans have been hammered over the last two decades - and have now put their faith in Trump. Let's hope he can fix the system. > This is a cynical take, but, roughly speaking, in Europe, there are workers rights, and in the US, employment is at-will. What's counter-intuitive to me is you would think in a system with more workers rights the workers would take more risks - but the opposite is true. I'm also surprised that in countries in Europe with huge youth unemployment we don't see outsized open source contributions.
acoye 8y ago
Actually MIT was modelled from the French "École Polytechnique". In a same way like the white house was a copy of "Château de Rastignac".
aurizon 8y ago
France has a problem with long lived institutions - they get filled with "union tenured" staff and new work suffers. I have heard that the French are well aware of this problem and when they establish an institution they set the budget and longevity for it. At the end of that time it is shut down and all the released people must find new jobs based on their merits. A long process to get rid of dead wood, which in the USA would be long gone.
gumby 8y ago
They are missing an important structural point: MIT isn't really a school, it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached (look at the budget for which education is about 14% of revenues and 16% of expenditures). Research is primary (whereas, as some other comments have noted, it has atrophied in the French Grandes Écoles). They need another INRIA in the mix -- though not INRIA itself; that excellent institution would not survive merging with these others. FWIW I am an MIT graduate who has lived and worked in research in the USA and France
rurban 8y ago
I'll take any EP hacker over any MIT hacker. They are just better. Anyone heard of OCAML, compilers, netsec or security engineering? That's where they are better.
ninguem2 8y ago
Why isn't the ENS part of this? The best math and science students go there.
- nestorD 8y ago
  Not the same spirit : ENS is more research and less engineering.
  - curiousgal 8y ago
    ENS is also more geared towards forming professors.
- relyio 8y ago
  Political/Administrative reasons mostly. ENS and l'X (Ecole Polytechnique) in particular hold special statuses (each in their respective way) vis-a-vis the French state.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- fiduciary 8y ago
  Guess Ecole Poly is good enough. Is ENS more like the Harvard/Oxford, and EP more like the MIT/Cambridge of France? This would be my layman reading of the situation, charitably not invoking politics.
  - occamrazor 8y ago
    EP and ENS are both excellent schools. I am a mathematician and mathematics is more traditionally associated with ENS than with EP, but I've met excellent mathematicians, at all level of career (from PhD student to full professor) from both schools. My impression is that all the French Grandes Ecoles are trying to expand their range of activities and subjects, reducing the level of diversification.
    - nolok 8y ago
tormeh 8y ago
Honestly sounds too big. Isn't a bit of the appeal of elite institutions that they put elite people in close proximity to each other? Adding a lot of padding* in between them would make it harder for them to find and get to know each other. *I am fully aware that in this context I am considered padding
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sneakware 8y ago
No 42 in the list, sad
- bsaul 8y ago
  42 doesn't have anything close to those schools regarding general science curriculum. No serious maths, no chemistry or physics , no engineering. It's a very good school if you want to learn to code in 3 years, but let's not make it anything else...
3D13158219 8y ago
I doubt it. Laboratories which teach and work in English have a huge advantage in modern academia because they are able to draw in talent from a far larger pool. The majority of international academics working in France are from other Romance language countries. I presume the other Romance language countries have the same problem as France.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  Having done research in both the U.S. and France, the latter is far better simply because of the general life quality. Language is not really that big of a factor. The U.S. definitely provides better research ressources but when you look at your life as a researcher as a whole, France is the better option.
- hevi_jos 8y ago
  French is an extremely easy language to pick for someone who already speaks English. In fact, English took from French over 30% of its vocabulary. French was the official language in England of the highly educated until mere centuries ago. Most researchers in France already speak English. The huge advantage of the US/UK is one: money, you could become rich and apply your ideas to real products(in a bigger market) much much more easily than in France. The huge advantage of France: quality of life.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    And much less pressure to commercialize, there is a lot of fundamental and other research that is not immediately aimed at generating a cash-cow somewhere.

69 points by sndean 8y ago

France already has an excellent research system, and the phrase "create its own MIT" is ambiguous at best: This is mainly about branding to increase international visibility of the institutions.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

elcomet 8y ago

CentraleSupelec is France's best attempt to match MIT (more than 1000 students each year). It was formed from the merger of Centrale Paris and Supelec schools. And it's a unique school, not like this merger: it's a reunion of several schools that want to keep their independance. I think it'll be harder for them to act in coordination to achieve their goals.

gtycomb 8y ago

What! The land that gave the world Fourier, Poincare, Galois, Laplace, Pascal, Lagrange, Cauchy, Descartes, Fermat, Hadamard, Borel ... they had their MIT a long time earlier.

adventured 8y ago
Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Australia has none of that immense legacy, due to the age of their nation. And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. The impressive history of France doesn't matter very much in the scope of most practical matters related to the present.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  > Which is meaningless in the present. Just ask Greece how valuable to your present circumstances basking in the very, very distant past is. Slightly off-topic, but for some reason I've run into a seemingly disproportionate (in terms of world population) number of good computer scientists who were born in Greece.
  - tnecniv 8y ago
    A Greek professor told me that when he started his PhD (in the US) his Greek advisor told him as a Greek in America his two options were to become a control theorist or open a diner.
- another-one-off 8y ago
  > And yet Australians are already richer than the French at the median, along with having a far higher GDP per capita. I agree with your main point, caveat that I don't know anything about the current state of French science because I don't know any French. With this aside though, Australia has an order of magnitude more land than France, and half as many people, so individual Australians should have an absurd amount of raw resource available to them. In a sense, Australia should have a GDP per capita 20x France's purely on raw resources. Comparing material wealth and academic success isn't really fair. Academics depends on small communities, and is a highly cultural endeavor. Wealth depends on resources and stability, which is less so.
  - ggg9990 8y ago
    Not really, because raw land is valuable for three things: agriculture, real estate, and natural resource extraction, and the first two are virtually worthless in deserts which is most of Australia’s land.
obscurantist 8y ago
Excuse me, but Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia was Italian.

coldtea 8y ago

What arrogance and ignorance. France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique. There's also INRIA and other institutions...

ggg9990 8y ago
The difference is that MIT draws on the world population whereas Ecole Polytechnique draws on the Francophone population.
- coldtea 8y ago
  That's their decision, and serves their purposes.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> France has its own MIT, it's called École Polytechnique Is EP’s productivity (in terms of companies founded by, landmark inventions/discoveries made by or patents awarded to) comparable to MIT? I thought it was more geared towards producing future politicians.
- da-bacon 8y ago
  Per alumni, it has the same rate of Nobel prize winners as MIT https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-start-1.20757 https://www.nature.com/news/where-nobel-winners-get-their-st...
  - sytelus 8y ago
    This is a good measure: divide number of Nobel winners by total student population. By that standard, EP seems to be top ranked. The problem is that the last EP student who won the prize was enrolled in 1960s. Many other winners were all the wY back in 1800s. It seems that EP was one of the best institute before WW II but then something happened and things went downhill. This could be great case study. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supérieure_people#Nobel_laureates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_École_normale_supéri...

jacquesm 8y ago

It can't, it shouldn't and it definitely does not have to. France is doing just fine in terms of research in many fields. Those that would like France to produce an 'MIT' would also like Europe to produce the next Facebook and neither is going to happen. But that doesn't mean things are bad, they're just different and no less valuable.

nickpeterson 8y ago
Out of curiosity, why is this true? Why does it seem like so many relevant tech companies are American, yet I see tons of talented European developers and conferences all the time? Are Euro nations just hostile to startups in a way the US isn't?
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  I'm not sure - but it's clear that having talented developers is not sufficient. What are the advantages to starting a startup in France vs joining an established company?
  - hedora 8y ago
    This is a cynical take, but, roughly speaking, in Europe, there are workers rights, and in the US, employment is at-will. The US systems tilts the scales toward stronger employees. So, the more marketable your skills are, the more incentive you have to move to SV. A slightly less offensive take on the situation is that, if you stay in Europe, you won’t be destitute, but you won’t get rich either. However, note that there are many articles on HN that attempt to quantify this effect by looking at economic mobility. The consensus is that Europe is becoming more of a meritocracy and in the US, economic status is increasingly determined at birth.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > The consensus is that Europe is becoming more of a meritocracy and in the US, economic status is increasingly determined at birth. Poor Americans have been hammered over the last two decades - and have now put their faith in Trump. Let's hope he can fix the system. > This is a cynical take, but, roughly speaking, in Europe, there are workers rights, and in the US, employment is at-will. What's counter-intuitive to me is you would think in a system with more workers rights the workers would take more risks - but the opposite is true. I'm also surprised that in countries in Europe with huge youth unemployment we don't see outsized open source contributions.

acoye 8y ago

Actually MIT was modelled from the French "École Polytechnique". In a same way like the white house was a copy of "Château de Rastignac".

aurizon 8y ago

France has a problem with long lived institutions - they get filled with "union tenured" staff and new work suffers. I have heard that the French are well aware of this problem and when they establish an institution they set the budget and longevity for it. At the end of that time it is shut down and all the released people must find new jobs based on their merits. A long process to get rid of dead wood, which in the USA would be long gone.

gumby 8y ago

They are missing an important structural point: MIT isn't really a school, it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached (look at the budget for which education is about 14% of revenues and 16% of expenditures). Research is primary (whereas, as some other comments have noted, it has atrophied in the French Grandes Écoles). They need another INRIA in the mix -- though not INRIA itself; that excellent institution would not survive merging with these others. FWIW I am an MIT graduate who has lived and worked in research in the USA and France

rurban 8y ago

I'll take any EP hacker over any MIT hacker. They are just better. Anyone heard of OCAML, compilers, netsec or security engineering? That's where they are better.

ninguem2 8y ago

Why isn't the ENS part of this? The best math and science students go there.

nestorD 8y ago
Not the same spirit : ENS is more research and less engineering.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  ENS is also more geared towards forming professors.
relyio 8y ago
Political/Administrative reasons mostly. ENS and l'X (Ecole Polytechnique) in particular hold special statuses (each in their respective way) vis-a-vis the French state.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fiduciary 8y ago
Guess Ecole Poly is good enough. Is ENS more like the Harvard/Oxford, and EP more like the MIT/Cambridge of France? This would be my layman reading of the situation, charitably not invoking politics.
- occamrazor 8y ago
  EP and ENS are both excellent schools. I am a mathematician and mathematics is more traditionally associated with ENS than with EP, but I've met excellent mathematicians, at all level of career (from PhD student to full professor) from both schools. My impression is that all the French Grandes Ecoles are trying to expand their range of activities and subjects, reducing the level of diversification.
  - nolok 8y ago

tormeh 8y ago

Honestly sounds too big. Isn't a bit of the appeal of elite institutions that they put elite people in close proximity to each other? Adding a lot of padding* in between them would make it harder for them to find and get to know each other. *I am fully aware that in this context I am considered padding

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sneakware 8y ago

No 42 in the list, sad

bsaul 8y ago
42 doesn't have anything close to those schools regarding general science curriculum. No serious maths, no chemistry or physics , no engineering. It's a very good school if you want to learn to code in 3 years, but let's not make it anything else...

3D13158219 8y ago

I doubt it. Laboratories which teach and work in English have a huge advantage in modern academia because they are able to draw in talent from a far larger pool. The majority of international academics working in France are from other Romance language countries. I presume the other Romance language countries have the same problem as France.

curiousgal 8y ago
Having done research in both the U.S. and France, the latter is far better simply because of the general life quality. Language is not really that big of a factor. The U.S. definitely provides better research ressources but when you look at your life as a researcher as a whole, France is the better option.
hevi_jos 8y ago
French is an extremely easy language to pick for someone who already speaks English. In fact, English took from French over 30% of its vocabulary. French was the official language in England of the highly educated until mere centuries ago. Most researchers in France already speak English. The huge advantage of the US/UK is one: money, you could become rich and apply your ideas to real products(in a bigger market) much much more easily than in France. The huge advantage of France: quality of life.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  And much less pressure to commercialize, there is a lot of fundamental and other research that is not immediately aimed at generating a cash-cow somewhere.