Paul
Braffort (France)
1923-2018
Paul
Braffort was born December 5, 1923 in Paris. His parents both worked for
Western Union, and when he was a child his father became a canvasser for the
Great Northern Telegraph Company of Denmark, traveling around France to solicit
new business. Braffort was a bright child, and thanks to a precocious
performance on his entrance exam and interview, was able to secure a
scholarship to the Lycée Buffon, where he laid the groundwork for his interest
in mathematics. His upbringing instilled a strong leftist political streak in
him as well as a love of music and film. He learned to play the piano as a
child, and developed an interest in jazz during his teens.
In 1939, the family moved to Normandy for
fear Paris might be bombed during the mounting hostilities of the Second World
War. While there, he enrolled in Philosophy with the intention of one day
teaching Natural History. When he accidentally turned up in the mathematics
classroom on his first day at the Lycée d'Alençon, he decided to stay. During
that year, he explored the work of Poincaré, Bergson, and Einstein, expanding
his understanding of physics and math.
In 1940, the Braffort family returned to
Paris. That November, Braffort participated in the first anti-Nazi protest in
occupied Europe together with other students from the Lycée Buffon. He
continued to take part in resistance activities throughout the war as part of a
group of students led by Jacques Baudry who disseminated leaflets and staged
protests. Baudry and four other members of the group were arrested and shot by
the Germans for their rebellion in 1943. These students are memorialized by a
plaque at the school, and the “Place des cinq martyrs du Lycée Buffon” near
Montparnasse station. When he learned of their deaths at the Liberation, Braffort
confirmed his dedication to political activism by joining the Communist Youth
movement and its subsequent incarnation, The Union of Republican Youth in
France (UJRF, l’Union de la jeunesse républicaine de France).
Braffort eventually took degrees in mathematics
and philosophy at the Sorbonne, and, while he intended to complete a thesis on
the foundation of mathematics under the direction of Gaston Bachelard, was
unable to do so for lack of a scholarship from the National Center for
Scientific Research (CNRS, Centre national de la recherche scientifique).
In 1949, Braffort joined the Atomic Energy
Commission of France as a librarian tasked with creating a new classification
system for the commission. In 1954, he was asked to create and direct the
Laboratory for Analogue Computation, and was thus at the forefront of computer
research in France. In 1959 he was transferred to Euratom (CEEA, Communauté
européenne de l'énergie atomique), where he continued work on computing and
formed the CETIS research group (Centre Européen de Traitement de l'Information
Scientifique).
On March 13, 1961, Braffort was inducted
into the OuLiPo as a founding member by Raymond Queneau and François Le
Lionnais, his friends and fellow mathematicians. His early contributions to the
workshop for potential literature concerned the use of computers. He published
his first book of poems, My Hypertropes: Twenty-One Minus One Programmed
Poems, as the ninth installment of the Bibliothéque Oulipienne in 1979.
Each poem in the series of twenty is dedicated to another writer who was a
member of the OuLiPo at the time and makes references to constraints and
publications by those writers. The principle of the work is based on
Zeckendorf’s theorem that any number can be expressed as the sum of two or more
Fibonacci numbers. Those Hypertropes that correspond with the Fibonacci
series (in which each number is the sum of the two preceding: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
13...etc.) contribute key words and phrases to the other poems. In short, each
poem is “programmed” by the poems containing those numbers that can be added to
make it; for example, the 12th poem contains words and references extracted
from Hypertropes 8, 3, and 1.
Between 1964 and 1971 Braffort was part of
the European Space Technology Center, where he worked in the emerging field of
artificial intelligence, a subject on which he would later publish numerous
essays and textbooks. After an appointment as a professor of computer science
at the University of Paris XI at Orsay, he ran a data-processing company for
several years and then was appointed a visiting scholar of “computational
linguistics” the University of Chicago from 1988 to 1991.
His early interest in computer-assisted
writing led him to co-found ALAMO [http://alamo.mshparisnord.org/] (Atelier de
Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs, or Workshop for
Literature Assisted by Mathematics and Computers) together with Jacques Roubaud
in 1981. Marcel Bénabou, Paul Fournel, and Italo Calvino were early members.
The group created computer programs for writing poems in various forms and
continues to explore the possibilities of combinatoric poetry.
Not only was Braffort a mathematician,
scientist, engineer, and poet, he was an accomplished songwriter. In 1958, he
released an album, "Des atomes et des hommes," which ties together
his interest in atomic energy, mathematics, eros, and wordplay. He continues to
write music, and recently released a triple album that includes settings of
poems by Raymond Queneau and a host of Oulipo writers (including Bénabou,
Calvino, Duchamp, Jacques Bens and Jean Queval). He maintained a website with
an extensive archive of his writings and compositions, which can be found at
http://www.paulbraffort.net/.
Paul Braffort died in Paris on May 4,
2018.
--Written
by Amaranth Borsuk and Gabriela Jauregui
BOOKS
OF POETRY and OTHER WORKS
Mes
hypertropes, vingt et un moins un poèmes à programme (Paris:
Bibliothèque Oulipienne n°9, 1979); Le désir (les désirs dans l’ordre des
amours) (Paris: Bibliothèque Oulipienne n°18, 1982); Les bibliothèques
invisibles (Bibliothèque Oulipienne n°48, 1990); Trente-quatre brazzles,
essais de critique littéraire potentielle précédés d’un avant-propos et
augmentés de notes explicatives par Walter Henry (Paris: Bibliothèque
Oulipienne n°58, 1992); Cinq lettres de créance: après la lecture de son
bavardage ready-made (Paris: Bibliothèque Oulipienne n°119, 2002); J
& I : les deux combinateurs et la totalité, Soixante-treize afables,
trente-sept dessins; précédés d’un bref investissement et suivis d’une glose en
prose (Bassac: PleinChant, 2002).
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