Science: 2025 CNRS Gold Medal awarded to mathematician Stéphane Mallat

The CNRS 2025 Gold Medal, one of France's most prestigious scientific awards, was awarded to mathematician Stéphane Mallat on Thursday, September 11, for his work on data storage, which has made him a key player in artificial intelligence.

A professor at the Collège de France and member of the computer science department of the École normale supérieure (ENS), Stéphane Mallat is 62 years old and currently works on the mathematical modeling of neural networks to explain the foundations of artificial intelligence (AI) .

He is a specialist "world-renowned for his work on wavelets, a method that allows data to be stored with little memory and analyzed efficiently," explains the CNRS.

Stéphane Mallat has developed pioneering research and "work around neurons, deep learning and generative AI" , considerably influencing "the scientific fields of mathematics and computer science, leading for example to developments in physics and chemistry" .

CNRS CEO Antoine Petit praised "the innovative work of Stéphane Mallat (which) has profoundly transformed signal and image processing, as well as modern AI."

Starting from original theoretical work, he developed its applications through to industrial transfer, notably by filing ten international patents, recalls the CNRS. In 2001, he founded the start-up Let It Wave, which he led until 2007. It transforms its major theoretical advances into industrial technologies such as, for example, the development of super-resolution chips for high-definition video.

Born in 1962 in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine), Stéphane Mallat was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the Courant Institute of New York University from 1995 to 1998. He returned to France to chair the applied mathematics department at the École Polytechnique from 1998 to 2001 and taught there until 2012 before joining the ENS and then the Collège de France in 2017.

He will receive his gold medal at a ceremony on December 17, along with a €50,000 grant from the CNRS Foundation.