In English this time. This announcement on the Collège de France's website gives me an excuse to add a couple of things that are well known in France, but less so outside, to the thread I wrote about my forthcoming move. 1/ https://twitter.com/cdf1530/status/1265320411295875072

One is that the Collège de France is a centuries-old institution: it was founded by King Francis 1st in 1530.

Another is that it is a very unusual place. All its lectures are open to the public, and they are supposed to showcase research in progress. 2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll%C3%A8ge_de_France

How to give a maths lecture that showcases research in progress and that could in principle reach a wide audience is clearly going to be a challenge.

Lectures are made available online, and they are not supposed to be repeated -- apparently many professors find this too ... 3/

quite challenging after a few years, but it is a healthy challenge that forces one to keep learning.

And the final challenge for me is that lectures have to be in French, but after spending the academic year 2017-8 in Paris I found that (with effort) I could do this. 4/

All three challenges are ones that I find exciting -- particularly the first. I would very much like to do something different from just giving a normal maths course, something more in the spirit of the Collège de France's tradition. But it's hard to know what exactly. 5/

I think it may take me a few years to get it right, and I may try to evolve my style slowly rather than jumping straight in with an experiment that could fail badly.

The reward if it all works is to become a public intellectual in France. What could be cooler than that? 6/

PS Here is the previous thread I referred to. And yes I know it should be "signé". Not sure how my brain got me to write "signer". It will take a while to get over the embarrassment, though no doubt I have many similar blunders ahead of me. 7/7 https://twitter.com/wtgowers/status/1263398371584348160?s=20