École Normale Supérieure

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See also École Normale de Musique de Paris.

The École normale supérieure (also known as Normale Sup', Normale, ENS, ENS-Paris, ENS-Ulm or Ulm) is arguably the most prestigious French grande école, whose main campus is located around the rue d'Ulm (Ulm Street) in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. To avoid confusion with similarly-named grandes écoles such as the École normale supérieure de Lyon, the Paris institution is often specified as 'ENS-Paris' or 'ENS-Ulm'. The ENS has annex campuses on Boulevard Jourdan (in Paris) and in Montrouge (a suburb), as well as a biology annex in the countryside at Foljuif.

1 Overview
2 Notable alumni
3 Notable professors
4 See also
5 External link

[edit] Overview

The quadrangle at the main ENS building on rue d'Ulm is known as the Cour aux Ernests – the Ernests being the goldfish in the pond.

Originally meant to train high school teachers through the agrégation, it is now an institution training researchers, university professors, high-level civil servants, as well as business and political leaders. It focuses on the association of training and research, with an emphasis on freedom of curriculum.

Its alumni include eight laureates of the Fields Medal (all French holders of the Fields medal were educated at the École Normale Supérieure), which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the mathematical sciences, as well as Nobel Prize winners in both science and literature.

Apart from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, three other écoles normales supérieures have been established, with similar goals:

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (sciences),
École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (humanities),
École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (pure and applied sciences, sociology, economics and management, English language).

As in many other grandes écoles, the ENS mostly enrolls its students two or three years after high school. The majority of them come from prépas (preparatory classes, see grandes écoles) and have to pass one of France's most selective competitive exams. Studies at ENS last four years. Many devote the third year to the agrégation which allows them to teach in high schools or universities. ENS-Ulm annually enrolls about 100 students in science and 100 in the humanities.

The normaliens, as the students of the ENS are known, keep a level of excellence in the various disciplines in which they are trained. Normaliens from France and other European Union countries are considered civil servants in training, and as such paid a monthly salary, in exchange for an agreement to serve France for 10 years, including those of studies. Although it is seldom applied in practice, this exclusivity clause is redeemable (often by the hiring firm).

Apart from the normaliens, ENS also welcomes select foreign students ("international selection"), as well as select students from neighboring universities, to follow the same curriculum along with the reception of a stipend. It also participates in various graduate programs and has extensive research laboratories.

The professors at the ENS are called the "caïmans", and the goldfish in the pond the "Ernests".

The fictitious mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki's "association of collaborators" is based at ENS.

[edit] Notable alumni

The year when they entered the ENS is between brackets.

Scientists
- Medicine and biology
  - Louis Pasteur (1843), chemist and microbiologist, confirmed the germ theory of disease
  - Cognitive Neuroscientists
    - Stanislas Dehaene (1984) (Current Chair of Experimental Psychology at the Collège de France)
- Physicists
  - Marcel Brillouin (1878)
  - Edouard Branly (1865)
  - Léon Brillouin
  - Thomas Fink
  - Paul Langevin (1894)
  - Hubert Curien (1945)
  - Yves Rocard
  - Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
  - Nobel Prize holders
    - Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (1953)
    - Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1951)
    - Gabriel Lippmann (1868)
    - Louis Néel (1924)
    - Jean Baptiste Perrin (1891, 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics)
    - Paul Sabatier (1874)
    - Alfred Kastler (1921, 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics)
- Mathematicians
  - Antoine Augustin Cournot
  - Évariste Galois (1829) originated Galois theory
  - Jean Gaston Darboux
  - Paul Emile Appell (1872)
  - Jacques Hadamard
  - Paul Painlevé (1883)
  - Edouard Lucas
  - Charles Emile Picard
  - Elie Cartan (1888)
  - Emile Borel (1889)
  - Mihailo Petrović (1890)
  - Henri Lebesgue
  - Maurice René Fréchet
  - Pierre Fatou (1898)
  - Szolem Mandelbrojt, cofounder of Bourbaki
  - André Weil (1922), cofounder of Bourbaki
  - Henri Cartan (1923), cofounder of Bourbaki
  - Jean Dieudonné (1924), cofounder of Bourbaki
  - Jacques Herbrand (1925)
  - Jean Leray (1926)
  - Claude Chevalley (1926)
  - Cahit Arf (1932)
  - Roger Godement (1940)
  - Adrien Douady (1954)
  - Fields Medal holders (all French holders of the Fields medal were educated at the École Normale Supérieure)
    - Laurent Schwartz (1934): 1950 Fields Medalist
    - Jean-Pierre Serre (1945): 1954 Fields Medalist
    - René Thom (1943): 1958 Fields Medalist
    - Alain Connes (1966): 1982 Fields Medalist
    - Pierre-Louis Lions (1947): 1994 Fields Medalist
    - Jean-Christophe Yoccoz (1975): 1994 Fields Medalist
    - Laurent Lafforgue (1986): 2002 Fields Medalist
    - Wendelin Werner (1987): 2006 Fields Medalist

Humanities
- Philosophers
  - Henri Bergson (1878) (1927 Nobel Prize in Literature)
  - Emile Auguste Chartier "Alain" (1889)
  - Hippolyte Taine (1893)
  - Viktor Chaim Blerot
  - Jean Cavaillès (1923) (resistant)
  - Raymond Aron (1924), political philosopher
  - Georges Canguilhem (1924), philosopher of science
  - Jean-Paul Sartre (1924) (declined 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature)
  - Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1926), phenomenologist
  - Jean Hyppolite
  - Simone Weil (1928), philosopher and mystic
  - Louis Althusser (1939), Marxist philosopher
  - Michel Foucault (1946), Historian of Systems of Thought
  - Jacques Derrida (1952), founder of deconstruction.
  - Étienne Balibar (1960)
  - André Comte-Sponville (1972)
- Sociologists (they studied philosophy at ENS)
  - Emile Durkheim (1879), considered as the founder of French sociology
  - Pierre Bourdieu (1951)
  - Raymond Boudon
- Writers (some were philosophers too)
  - Romain Rolland (1886) (1915 Nobel Prize in Literature)
  - Charles Péguy (1894), poet
  - Jean Giraudoux (1903), playwright
  - Jules Romains (1906), novelist
  - Paul Nizan (1924)
  - Paul Bénichou (1927)
  - Robert Brasillach, novelist, critic and pro-nazi collaborationist
  - Julien Gracq (1930), novelist and literary critic
  - Aimé Césaire (1935), poet and politician
  - Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet and president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980
  - Assia Djebar (1955), Algerian novelist anf film-malker
  - Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (1980)
- Literary Critics
  - Jean-Pierre Richard (1941)
  - Gérard Genette,
- Historical Sciences
  - Lucien Febvre (1899), cofounder of the Annales School
  - Marc Bloch (1904), cofounder of the Annales School
  - Marcel Granet (1904), sinologist
  - Georges Dumézil (1916), specialist of Proto-Indo-European society and creator of the trifunctional hypothesis
  - Neil MacGregor, art historian, Director of the British Museum
  - Jacques Soustelle (1929), ethnologist
  - Jacques Le Goff (1945), medievalist
  - Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1949), historian
- Geography
  - Paul Vidal de la Blache (1863), considered as the founder of French modern geography
- Journalists
  - Pierre Brossolette (1922) (politician and resistant)

Economists
- Gérard Debreu (1941) 1983 (Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel)

Politicians
- Jean Jaurès (1878) Socialist leader
- Paul Painlevé (1883), mathematician and Prime minister of France in 1917 and 1925
- Léon Blum (1890) (expelled during his third year), First Socialist Prime Minister of France in 1936
- Édouard Herriot (1891), Prime minister of France in 1924-1925, 1926 and 1932
- Georges Pompidou (1931), Prime minister of France from 1962 to 1968 and President of France from 1969 to 1974
- Alain Juppé (1964), Prime minister of France from 1995 to 1997
- Laurent Fabius (1966), Prime minister of France from 1984 to 1986