My Mathematical Journey: France

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud

David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences

In the summer of 1985 Jan and I were married. We then headed off for a year’s sabbatical in France, at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France (today part of the Université de Strasbourg.). I was to work with combinatorialist Dominique Foata and his research team.

Foata, a student of Marcel-Paul Shützenberger, had started the Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire with Adalbert Kerber in Bayreuth and Volker Strehl of Erlangen in 1980. Lotharingia, a short-lived successor state to Charlemagne’s empire, lay in the borderlands where today France and Germany meet, stretching from the modern Benelux countries down through Switzerland. It has been an appropriate designation for this effort that began as a Franco-German collaboration. I attended the early seminars and had been impressed by the work of Foata and his team. This opportunity enabled me to get back to France for an entire year.

I want to indulge in a personal digression, but before I do that I need to pose a mathematical problem. For this month, I have chosen to look at Gaussian polynomials and a remarkable result of Kathleen O’Hara from the 1980s. See Figure 1 for the problem and Figures 2–4 for a discussion of O’Hara’s result.

Back to my personal digression. As an American with a French surname, I am sometimes asked if my family comes from French Canada. In fact, it was my grandfather, French by ancestry and Peruvian by birth, who immigrated to the United States. To this day I have strong family ties both to France and to South America.

My great-grandfather, François Bressoud, was born in Romans-sur-Isère in southeastern France in 1867. When he was 8 his father died, and his mother sent him to live with her brother-in-law in Tours. François apprenticed as a pharmacist. In 1889 he arranged for himself and his brother Lucien, then 16, to travel to Buenos Aires as agricultural workers. There he managed to find himself a job in a pharmacy lab, quickly paid off their passage, and was able to arrange for his mother to join them. In the following years, François moved through Latin America, first to Caracas, Venezuela, then by 1897 to Costa Rica.

Victorine Sengès, my great-grandmother, was born in Montoulieu-Saint-Bernard in 1875. This tiny commune lies southwest of Toulouse and about 40 kilometers from the Spanish border. My father has speculated that Sengès might be a French transliteration of Sanchez. Her father, a modest farmer, died when she was 13. Victorine had a step-brother, Joseph Pomeyrol, five years older, who went to Caracas in 1890 to escape the family’s grinding poverty. Five years later, in 1895, she joined him, traveling alone.

My cousin Benoît has provided some sense of the difficulties of this trip.

“The voyage was most often undertaken by train to Marseille, Bordeaux, Cherbourg, or Le Havre (to a lesser extent La Rochelle, Dunkerque, or Nantes), then most often by a cargo-carrying sailing ship as that was less expensive. The crossing lasted several weeks and the conditions of life on board were primitive. Especially for Victorine who was the only woman on board, the crossing would have been difficult.”

Victorine found employment as a secretary to a French businessman. By 1897 Victorine and Joseph had also moved to Costa Rica. François and Joseph had established a strong friendship, probably while still in Caracas. Joseph brought Victorine to François’s 30th birthday party. They fell in love and soon decided to marry. They needed to choose a country where they could raise a family and where François could start his own pharmacy business. With a flip of a coin, Peru was chosen. In December of 1897, they were married in Lima.

They had eight children of whom my grandfather, Marius or Mario, born in 1899, was the second child and the eldest son. By 1903 François’s business was thriving, and he began making trips to New York to meet with suppliers. In 1916 François brought Marius to New York, just a few days shy of his 17th birthday, and set him up as a shipping clerk in a business that was just starting to expand into the Latin American market, Scott’s Emulsion (a cod liver oil product). In 1935 my grandfather moved the family to Buenos Aires to oversee Argentine operations for Lanman & Kemp, Barclay. That’s where my father, Marius, Jr., spent his high school years.

In 1926, François sold his business and returned the family to France. Two of Marius’s brothers and one of his sisters would join him in the United States. (Eddie Bressoud, the former major league shortstop, is the son of Marius’s brother Charles.) One sister remained in Peru, marrying another Peruvian of French descent. While Lucien eventually returned to France, François had helped many of his cousins to establish themselves in South America, so I have more distant family scattered across Peru, Chile, and Argentina.

The children that returned to France had families that produced many of my second cousins. During the 1980s I often joined family randonées (hikes) in the French Alpes. By 1985 when we went to Strasbourg, my French was sufficiently fluent that I could give my lectures in that language.

In many respects, it was a magical year. We visited family across France as well as traveling through Europe and to Morocco. We fell in love with Strasbourg and Alsace. Every weekend we would pick a different neighborhood or small village to explore. Alsace has a unique culture: Germanic and yet very, very French.

Mathematically, the year was less of a success. Foata was in the throes of adapting TeX for French and French keyboards, so I was working on my own. The graduate lectures I gave began with basic partition theory and worked up through the Macdonald-Morris conjectures that I discussed last month. One of Foata’s graduate students, Laurent Habsieger, was inspired to solve several of these conjectures, immediately leading to his doctoral thesis.

I returned from France in the summer of 1986 to learn that I had been promoted to full Professor. I had not even known that I was up for that promotion. Things worked differently then.

But it had been a frustrating time mathematically. I made little progress on any of the problems I had set myself. Looking back, that year launched a reappraisal of my priorities. I would begin to question whether research in pure mathematics was where I wanted to focus my energies.

Figure 5: Left to right: Sylvia T. Bozeman, Kathleen O’Hara, Linda Pace, Ellen Kirkman, and Abbe Herzig at the National Forum *Promoting Diversity at the Graduate Level in Mathematics*, held at MSRI in 2008.

Photograph of Strasbourg Cathedral by Jonathon Martz licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Download the list of all past Launchings columns, dating back to 2005, with links to each column.