Created in 1954, the CNRS Gold Medal is one of France's most prestigious scientific awards. This year, it honors mathematician Stéphane Mallat, a professor at the Collège de France, in recognition of his work in mathematics applied to signal processing and artificial intelligence. Stéphane Mallat was appointed holder of the Data Science Chair at Collège de France in 2017.
He will be awarded the CNRS Gold Medal on December 17 2025 at a ceremony in Paris.
Born in 1962 in Suresnes, France, Stéphane Mallat first studied at the École Polytechnique in 1981, before obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in the USA in 1988. He defended his habilitation thesis in mathematics at Paris-Dauphine University in 1992, before becoming Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at New York University's Courant Institute from 1995 to 1998. After these years on the other side of the Atlantic, Stéphane Mallat returned to France, where he chaired the Applied Mathematics Department at the École Polytechnique from 1998 to 2001. He remained a professor there until 2012, before joining the Computer Science Department at the École normale supérieure. He was subsequently appointed Professor at the Collège de France in 2017, where he holds the Data Science Chair.
Stéphane Mallat now works on the mathematical modeling of neural networks to explain the foundations of artificial intelligence. He is also a member of the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Technologies and the National Academy of Engineering in the USA.
After Françoise Combes in 2020, Jean Dalibard in 2021, Jean-Marie Tarascon in 2022 and Edith Heard in 2024, Stéphane Mallat is the fifth professor at the Collège de France to receive this prestigious distinction.
