A new “museum of mathematics” will open in Paris as part of a drive to inspire French schoolchildren, who rank among the most innumerate in the developed world.
The Maison Poincaré, named after Henri Poincaré, the late 19th century polymath, will celebrate mathematicians who put France at the forefront of the discipline from the middle ages to the 21st century.
The museum, set to open this year, is attempting to spark a renaissance in the face of an educational failure that is deemed a national emergency.
French pupils ranked bottom in the subject in the EU, while only those from Chile fared worse than the French among the 38 countries of the OECD, according to a Trends in International Mathematics and Science study.
Their poor grasp of the subject was further highlighted by the fact that half of French 12-year-olds thought 0.4 was the same as a quarter, Charles Torossian, an inspector-general of the national education system, said.
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In addition, the children of Ukrainian refugees were, despite the language barrier, at least a year ahead of their French classmates in numeracy.
The museum was the brainchild of Cédric Villani, former director of the Poincaré maths institute and former MP for Macron’s Renaissance party.
Sylvie Benzoni, his successor as head of the institute, said the museum aimed to show that maths was open to everyone and no longer the property of “a mainly male elite”.
Last summer President Macron restored maths as an option in the non-science stream of the baccalauréat, the A-level equivalent, two years after Jean-Michel Blanquer, his education minister, had removed it. He sacked Blanquer and last month made weekly maths classes compulsory for all streams from September.
