Michèle Artigue

Michèle Artigue (born 1946) is a French expert in mathematics education, a professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University and the former president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction. Artigue was born in 1946 in Bordères-sur-l'Échez, a small town in the Pyrenees. She was the daughter of a kindergarten teacher, and writes that she was "always interested in mathematics". She attended the lycée in Tarbes, the nearest town large enough for that level of school, and then spent two years in a preparatory mathematics course for entrance to the grandes écoles in Toulouse, where her sister worked as a teacher. She became a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1965. Her instructors included Gustave Choquet, Henri Cartan, and Laurent Schwartz. After her son was born in 1967, her mother came to live with her in Paris to help take care of him. At approximately the same time, she became interested in model theory through a book by Georg Kreisel and Jean-Louis Krivine. She took part in a student protest in 1968, part of the May 1968 events in France, in which most of the students refused to take the oral part of the agrégation exam, but their resistance to the exam did not last and she completed her agrégation in 1969. Following this she became a student at the University of Paris, studying mathematical logic, and when it split into multiple universities in 1970 she chose to go to Paris Diderot University. She completed her doctorate there in 1972. While still a doctoral student, Artigue became a faculty member at what would become Paris Diderot University in 1969. In part as fallout from the student protests, in the same year, the Institute of Research in Mathematics Education (IREM) was founded at the university, with André Revuz as its director, and Revuz invited Artigue to become one of its members. Through her involvement with the institute, her interests shifted from logic to mathematics education. Artigue directed IREM from 1985 to 1988.