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AFCAL and the Emergence of Computer Science in France: 1957–1967

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Pursuit of the Universal (CiE 2016)

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Abstract

Founded in 1957, the Association Française de Calcul (AFCAL) was the first French society dedicated mainly to numerical computation. Its rapid growth and amalgamation with sister societies in related fields (Operations Research, Automatic Control) in the 1960s resulted in changes of its name and purpose, including the invention and adoption of the term informatique in 1962–1964, then in the adoption of cybernétique in 1967. Our paper aims at explicating the motives of its creation, its evolving definition and the functions it fulfilled. We seek to understand how this association, altogether a learned and a professional society, contributed to the emergence and recognition of Computing as an academic discipline in France. The main sources are the scattered surviving records of AFCAL, conserved in the archives of the Observatoire de Paris, of the Institut de Mathématiques appliquées de Grenoble (IMAG) and of the CNRS’ Institut Blaise Pascal in Paris, as well as AFCAL’s first congress and journal, Chiffres.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This question is addressed in a broader scope in Mounier-Kuhn (2010a).

  2. 2.

    Archives de l’Observatoire de Paris, Ms 1061 II-2-D.

  3. 3.

    See the papers by Anne Brygoo, Jean Carteron, Colette Hoffsaës and Félix Paoletti in the proceedings of Colloque sur l’histoire de l’informatique en France, 1988.

  4. 4.

    The present text is only a provisional account of a work in progress, and should not be quoted without the authors’ permission.

  5. 5.

    Our choice of J. Kuntzmann as a key actor is based on his role as a science entrepreneur and the availability of his correspondence conserved at the Archives départementales de l’Isère (Grenoble), henceforth ADI.

  6. 6.

    J. Kuntzmann’s letters to J. Pérès and R. Darmois, May 3 1956 (ADI IMAG 4).

  7. 7.

    J. Kuntzmann’s letters to J. Heinhold, TH München, June 5 1956 (ADI IMAG 4). On the Darmstadt conference, see Petzold (2004).

  8. 8.

    J. Kuntzmann’s letter to AIC, October 2 1956 (ADI IMAG 4).

  9. 9.

    J. Kuntzmann’s letter to É. de Lacroix de Lavalette, May 4 1956 (ADI IMAG 4); and É. de Lacroix de Lavalette’s historical report on his Groupe de calcul numérique, 1995. Private archives of the first author.

  10. 10.

    Evry Schatzmann’s interview with J.-F. Picard, February 24 1987.

  11. 11.

    Annuaire 1963 de l’AFCALTI. Archives privées de J. Carteron.

  12. 12.

    Correspondence between I. Auerbach, A. Danjon, J. Carteron, J. Kuntzmann and J. Ville, December 7–12 1957 (ADI IMAG 5) and Archives de l’Observatoire de Paris, Ms 1061 II-2-D.

  13. 13.

    The 600 pages proceedings were published by the UNESCO both in Paris (1960) and London (1960). Pierre Auger happened to coin the term Traitement de l’information, translated from “Information processing”. The journal of the congress can be found at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001537/153718fb.pdf.

  14. 14.

    Journal du Congrès, No. 6, p. 2 (italics ours).

  15. 15.

    J. Carteron’s letter to A. Danjon, December 6 1957 (Archives de l’Observatoire de Paris, Ms 1061 II-2-D).

  16. 16.

    P. Mounier-Kuhn’s interview with Ph. Dreyfus, September 21 2007.

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Mounier-Kuhn, PÉ., Pégny, M. (2016). AFCAL and the Emergence of Computer Science in France: 1957–1967. In: Beckmann, A., Bienvenu, L., Jonoska, N. (eds) Pursuit of the Universal. CiE 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9709. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40189-8_18

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