Moderator: Caroline Lachowsky
Guests:
- Françoise Combes, astrophysicist, professor at the Collège de France in the Galaxies and Cosmology chair, researcher at the Observatoire de Paris.
- Christian Grataloup, geohistorian, professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University.
- Sabrina Krief, veterinarian and ecologist, specialist in great apes, professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle.
- Stéphane Mallat, mathematician, Professor of Data Science at the Collège de France.
How do we measure and represent distances? Understanding distances is first and foremost a perceptive and cognitive faculty that we share with other animals, whose extraordinary orientation abilities form the biological basis of our ideas of territory and boundaries. Beyond this, mathematics has enabled us to develop an advanced representation and understanding of space and flows, a geography and increasingly precise maps of reality, right up to describing the structure of the Universe. How do all these different kinds of maps fit together to open up the field of our knowledge? What do they say about us, our appetite for knowledge and the tools we've devised to understand the world, from the nearest to the farthest?
