Jean-Pierre Robin: "The French economy, islands of excellence and profits in an ocean of losses"

Cock-a-doodle-doo, the French who are good at maths are at the forefront of global research, happily hoarding the Fields Medals (the profession's Nobel Prize, awarded every four years). "Excellent training in mathematics gives us a head start," rightly rejoiced Clara Chappaz , the Minister for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs, at the World AI Summit held in Paris on February 10 and 11.

Catastrophe, our middle school students are dunces in calculations and they are ranked second to last among OECD countries in the international Pisa and Timss rankings. Shame on us, 50% of sixth grade students do not know how to say "how many quarters of an hour are in three quarters of an hour". And yet, nearly 20,000 of our engineers and computer scientists have moved to Silicon Valley, a suburb of San Francisco and a mecca of American technology where the French form one of the leading foreign scientific communities.