François Jacob (1920–2013)

François Jacob (1920–2013)

“Plus que jamais, la recherche me paraissait s’identifier à la nature humaine. En exprimer l’appétit, le désir de vivre. C’était bien le meilleur moyen trouvé par l’homme de braver le chaos de l’univers. De dominer la mort.” (More than ever, scientific research seemed to me to be intrinsic to human nature. It expressed the hunger, the desire to live. It has, in fact, been the best means found b...

19 April 2013 − − François Jacob . 17 June 1920

19 April 2013 − − François

Assignment 3 François Séguin

Question 1 First, we have that λ − λ − 2 = (λ + 1)(λ − 2). Therefore, it is true that the eigenvalues of the corresponding adjacency matrix come in pairs of additive inverse. However, notice that ± √ −1 are eigenvalues, and therefore the associated matrix cannot be symmetric (there would only be real eigenvalues). We conclude that no undirected graph can have the above characteristic polynomial...

The Planck mission François

These lecture notes discuss some aspects of the Planck1 mission, whose prime objective was a very accurate measurement of the temperature anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We announced our findings a few months ago, on March 21st , 2013. I describe some of the relevant steps we took to obtain these results, sketching the measurement process, how we processed the data to obt...