Top 10 of my favorites stuffs

Note

The lists are not sorted

All these tops 10 are not sorted (admit it, it’s just impossible to say this movie is MY favorite!).

Cinema

My 10 favorite movies

Voir aussi

Another top 7 of favorite movies… by my friend Jill-Jênn Vie.

My 10 favorite movies actors/actresses

My 10 favorite TV shows

My 10 favorite YouTube channels

Voir aussi

This page lists what I watch in YouTube.

Music

My 10 favorite bands/artists

  • Iron Maiden,

  • Pomme,

  • Jim Croce,

  • Koji Kondo,

  • Joan Baez,

  • Joe Hisaichi ,

  • John Lang « Pen of Chaos » / Naheulband,

  • Leonard Cohen,

  • John Williams,

  • I can’t decide for the last one: I really like a lot of artists, including Asaf Avidan, Eddie Vedder, Jacques Brel, the French singer Pomme, French singer Renaud, Airelle Besson, ACDC, Angèle, Antony and the Jonhsons, Apocalyptica, Birdy, Bob Dylan, Camille Laïly, Claude Nougaro, Damien Saez, Coeur de Pirate, Danheim, Djiboutep and Michel Tonnerre, Era, Estas Tonne, François Hardy, Freddie Mercury and Queen, Georges Brassens, Guillaume de Chassy, the Grissini Project, Hugh Laurie, Imany, Indochine, Karliene, Journey, French band LEJ, Led Zeppelin, Light in Babylon, Léo Ferré, Malukah, Mandy Lerouge, Mansfield TYA, Metallica, Neil Diamond, Neil Young, Nightwish, Noir Désir, Miossec, Paul Lay, Peter Hollens, Ray Charles, Rémi Panossian, Scorpions, Slow Jane, Sting, Stromae, Taylor Davis, The Beatles, The Consouls, The Police, French singer Thiéfaine, Wardruna, Yom, and many more…

My 10 favorite songs

My 10 favorite jazz player or bands

  • Airelle Besson : trump, piano and voice. I saw her and Madeleine Cazenave in concert in Rennes in November 2019, just a few days before my PhD defense, it was great!), and I especially love the song Radio One ;

  • Camille Laïly : singer and guitarist, I really love her covers of Claude Nougaro songs and original as well as covers solo songs ;

  • Guillaume de Chassy : a great pianist and composer. I saw him in a trio with piano, double bass, and clarinet, in Saint-Malo in February 2020, it was amazing! I especially like his album inspired by Barbara ;

  • Hugh Laurie (yes, the actor from House, MD), for his two great albums of covers of classical jazz songs, I especially love the songs Battle of Jericho and Kiss of Fire ;

  • John Coltrane, an old classical jazz artist, I especially love the song My Little Brown Book ;

  • Paul Lay and his trio Paul Lay Jazz, I especially love the song Amour et Printemps ;

  • Rémy Panossian : another great French pianist and composer. I saw him in a trio in Hyderabad in India in 2015, and again in solo in Rennes in 2019, it was great to see him again!

  • Snarky Puppy (but is it jazz?) ;

  • The Consouls : a great jazz band from USNA, who perform covers of video games and movies songs ;

  • 10th : and you, what are your favorite jazz artists? Tell me!

À faire

Add links to their YouTube channels or official website?

Video Games

My 10 favorite GameBoy games

My 10 favorite PC games

Travelling

My 10 favorite places in France

My 10 favorite cities of the world

Reading

My 10 favorite comic books (French « BD »)

My 10 favorite book writers

My 10 favorite web comics

It’s very nice to read regularly these web-comics, because they are fun and interesting, and because they follow and thus inform you of the current events (whether they are geopolitical, cultural or technological). Another good reason is that as they are distributed by numerical formats (PNG etc), you can easily download them and then include them in a web-page, or a teaching document, and that’s fun and smart to do! Humour and graphic images are very powerful tools, even for teaching! They are ordered by date, starting from the ones I know and have been reading since the longest time:

  • Calvin and Hobbes is the oldest comic, by American author Bill Watterson, although not a true web-comic but it can be read on this website (gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes). It was active in the 1990s and was published everyday, for instance here is the strip from my birth day! Some that I really like are: TODO: ;

  • XKCD (xkcd.com) is probably the world most famous web-comic, being read by millions of people from more than 15 years (as of 2021). The comic’s tagline describes it as « A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language ». Munroe states on the comic’s website that the name of the comic is not an initialism but « just a word with no phonetic pronunciation ». It is published three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), and is always richer in ideas, puns and visual jokes as well as visualization of geopolitical or technological events, mainly focused on the USNA and spatial exploration. XKCD also has the advantage of being published under a Creative Commons license, which gives you explicit and legal rights to include the comics in your own CC-licensed document. Some that I really like are: tar command, flying thanks to Python (which was included in Python, type import antigravity to try!), about log-scale and in favor of nuclear power (like me!), and so many more. Check-out the awesome wiki explain XKCD, a community-driven project to explain and discuss about each strip! Check-out the books « What if? », and the more recent book by the author, Randall Munroe ;

  • Questionable Content (questionablecontent.net) « is an internet comic strip about friendship, romance, and robots. The world of QC is set in the present day (whenever the present day actually is) and is pretty much the same as our own except there are robots all over the place and giant space stations and the United States wasn’t ravaged by a pandemic in 2020 and…okay so there are some differences. But it’s not too far off! Anyway it’s set in Northampton, Massachusetts and follows best buddies Marten and Faye as they navigate life, make friends and forge relationships, and there is definitely some robot smoochin” later on. ». It’s drawn by American Jeph Jacques. I have been reading it since late 2012 I think, and almost everyday (Monday-Friday). It’s not always as funny as the best ones, but for a comic book with more than 4000 strips, that’s normal! It is always respectful, representative of minorities (including AI!), rich in ideas and puns. Some that I really like are: TODO: ;

  • PhDComics (phdcomics.com) is a newspaper and webcomic strip written and drawn by Jorge Cham that follows the lives of several grad students in Stanford, USNA. It is always fun and very smart, and a quite accurate depiction of a life of graduate students (PhD students). Reading it for many years was one of the reason I was not scared to start my PhD! I have been reading it since 2013 I think, but the author has stopped publishing new strips. Some that I really like are: average time to send an email, student vs prof, and others TODO: ;

  • Oglaf (oglaf.com): « is a sexually explicit comedy webcomic produced by Australians Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne ». The comics are published every Sunday morning, and I’m reading them since at least 2014 (I think). Most of them are quite sexually explicit, but many are not and are just fun. They take place in a fantasy worlds, containing elements from all the main pop culture and fantasy worlds, including LoTR, GoT, D&D, Star Wars, etc. See the Oglaf archive, and some good ones are these: about Amazon linguists, Death discussing the next disease, bait: everyone loves compliment, don’t call the manager, fight the lions day at the zoo!, write an apology song, just in case, or also pay to win and a reference to Zelda ;

  • CommitStrip (commitstrip.com) is a webcomic about a small startup or tech company, who produces websites and other computer-related technological products such as apps. It focuses on a few characters, and it is a very realistic and fun view of the daily life in a IT office. It is the only one here written by a French author and translated to English. I have been reading it since 2018 I think. Some that I really like are: advices for video calls, TODO: ;

  • Dumbing of Age (dumbingofage.com), « is a webcomic about college freshmen in the girls wing within a co-ed dorm at Indiana University, learning everything about life and themselves usually in the most difficult ways. It stars a Christian homeschooled girl and her atheist best friend, and also a disgraced cheerleader, a misanthrope, a rebel, and a caped vigilante ». I have been reading it since 2017 I think, and almost everyday. It’s not always very funny, but quite smartly written and fun to read. Some that I really like are: TODO: ;

  • Others include: Les indégivrables par Xavier Gorce about French politic and French social life, very active and very fun ; Une année au lycée par Fabrice Erre about the daily life of a high-school history professor in France.

My 10 favorite blogs

Voir aussi

This page lists the blog I read.

Inspirational people

Here are a few lists of great scientist and persons that I consider to be very inspirational.

My 10 favorite historical figures

I am a strong believer of the value of Pacifism, and I refuse to admire military figures or « great warriors », because as Yoda says in Star Wars, « Wars not make one great » (in The Empire Strikes Back).

  • King Arthur, at least the version of Alexandre Astier in Kaamelott!

  • Gandhi ;

  • Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalaï Lama ;

  • Martin Luther King ;

  • Nelson Mandela ;

  • Abbé Pierre ;

À faire

Write this top10 !

My 10 favorite computer scientists in the 20th century

  • Alan Turing, for his machines and inspirational fight in the governments repression against non-heterosexual persons. I have taught different classes on computability and complexity since 2016, and used Turing Machines a lot ;

  • Kurt Gödel, for fondamental work on the foundations of computer science and mathematics. His incompleteness theorems that I studied in 2012 (during my Bachelor degree in Computer Science) are probably the theoretical results that most amazed me, ever ;

  • Grace Hopper, very inspirational marine admiral and one of the most influential early software developer (first compiler) ;

  • Margaret Hamilton, very inspirational lead developer of the team who wrote most of the code for the Apollo Mission in the 1960s ;

  • Donald Knuth, legendary programmer and professor of computer scientist, mainly inspirational for his work on TeX and METAFONT and hiw awesome website ;

  • Guido van Rossum, legendary programmer and creator of Python ;

  • Leslie Lamport, legendary researcher of computer scientist, mainly inspirational for his work on LaTeX ;

  • Richard Stallman, legendary programmer and creator of the GNU project, first and main programmer of GCC, GNU Make, GNU Emacs and many more important tools for open-source software and GNU/Linux systems. I met him in Rennes in 2017!

  • Tim Berners-Lee, legendary figure of the early days of the Internet, less known for his current fights for a free and non-regulated Internet ;

  • Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, and legendary figure of computer science and especially the development of personal computers. His famous « Moore’s law » is the best example of a self-realizing prophecy: it was announced by the co-founder of the very company which worked to fulfil the prophecy, now true for more than 55 years.

My 10 favorite computer scientists of the 21st century

Voir aussi

Other computer scientists I admire:

This list is highly disorganized: Katie Bouman for her amazing work to produce the first ever image of a black whole, and using Python and the Jupyter project for this work ; Michael Unser with whom I worked in 2016 at EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland) ; Jill-Jênn Vie to be a great inspiration since 2013 ; my late friend Rémi Cheval since 2014 ; Karl Voit for his amazing blog and Karli Koss too ; Fabrice Bellard ; Noam Chomsky ; Thierry Coquand ; Jean-Paul Delahaye ; Douglas Engelbart ; a few colleagues at CentraleSupelec campus de Rennes ; my colleagues at ENS Rennes and Rennes since 2016: Luc Bougé, David Cachéra, David Pichardie, Romaric Gaudel, Nathalie Bertrand, Martin Quinson, Patrice Quinton and François Schwarzentruber, and others ; my colleagues at Inria Lille, mainly Odalric-Ambrym Maillard, Philippe Preux, Olivier Pietquin, and others including amazing PhD students ; Benjamin Bayart ; Stéphane Bortzmeyer ;

My 10 favorite scientists of the 20st century

  • David Hilbert, I was amazed by his list of problems and the fact that most of them were and still are the main research goals in many directions of mathematics and computer science ;

  • Nikolas Tesla, for his life-long dedication to science, to common good and the fact that he refused to make money from his creations.

  • Bertrand Russell, for his amazing work on logic and foundations of mathematics, that I discovered in the famous comic book « Logicomix » ;

  • John von Neumann, for many incredibly useful contributions in various domains and especially computer science, and for being one the most famous and inspirational polymath of our time ;

  • Richard Feynman, for his physics lecture and books, and being a famous professor recognized for the quality of his lectures ;

  • Claude Shannon, for a very inspiration career and amazing works on the foundations of information theory, which had huge influence in computer science, maths and signal processing, and also his passion about juggling ;

  • Boris Vian, the famous French poet and singer, was also a great engineer even if he is not known for this ;

  • John Forbes Nash, for being an inspirational figure of a great mathematician and career in science, despite suffering all his life from a mental illness. Have you watched « A Beautiful Mind », a movie about his life?

  • Hedy Lamarr, the perfect example of what some newspapers or authors call « a great woman in science », not known enough despite a great career in Hollywood and cinema, and a major contribution in telecommunication and algorithms ;

  • Richard Garfield for the amazing game Magic of the Gathering (did you know he has a PhD in mathematics? he was the first PhD of maths that I knew of, when I was 11 and he was inspirational for many years!) ;

My 10 favorite scientists before 1900

  • Al-Khwârizmî in the 9th century, who is recognized as one of the earlier scientist to work on algorithms between 780 and 850 ;

  • Léonard de Vinci in the 15th and 16th centuries in France and Italy, for being an incredible polymath ;

  • René Descartes in the 17th century in France, for his writings, his works on mathematics and philosophy, and for giving some arguments that still constitutes my life philosophy ;

  • Blaise Pascal in the 17th century in France, for his mathematical work but most importantly his work on the « Pascaline », one of the earliest mechanical computing machine, precursor to the work of Lovelace two centuries later ;

  • Isaac Newton in the 18th century in England, for amazing work in mathematics, physics and many other domains ;

  • Carl Friedrich Gauss in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Germany, for amazing works in all branches of mathematics, and early discovery of what would later become the Fast Fourier Transform, the Karatsuba algorithms, and many more ;

  • Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, who are recognized as one of the earlier scientist to work on algorithms between 1780 and 1850 ;

  • Lewis Carroll was a mathematics professor and writer ;

  • Évariste Galois, a brilliant young mathematician, student in Paris at École Normale Supérieure (de la rue d’Ulm), who most probably was murdered (in a forced duel) because of his political convictions and true French democratic spirit ;

  • Gaspard Monge, for his mathematical works as well as his political carreer.

My 10+10+10 most inspirational famous (alive) people

From France:

  • Sylvain Tesson, a great writer, traveler, ecologist ;

  • Pablo Servigne, ecologist and great talker ;

  • Cyril Dion, another famous ecologist and great writer (I loved his book « Petit Manuel de Résistance Contemporaine »;

  • Aurélien Barrau, a famous astrophysician and ecologist ;

  • I have more names, including some important women, in mind, TODO: write them ;

From North America:

  • Barack Obama, not for his Nobel prize despite the fact that his government was in war for 8 years, but for his ecological fights, his great personality and very inspirational and rational talks ;

  • Julian Assange, for his fight for true information ;

  • Keanu Reeves, the most inspirational male actor from USNA, for a great carreer but mainly a great human being. So selfless! 9Gag community love him, for good reasons!

  • Edward Snowden, a true hero of modern times, because as I read already on Twitter (don’t go there, boycott it but read it without an account, if needed) and 9Gag, the greatest patriot from the USA is currently living in exile in Russia ;

  • Bill Gates, not for what he did to become rich, but what he does since then. He is one of the world largest philanthropist and writes books and give talks about ecology and how to avoid a global climate disaster ;

  • Joan Baez, a famous peace activist and singer (whose music I love), and John Lennon too ;

From the rest of the world:

  • Greta Thunberg, one of the most inspirational young ecologist fighter ever ;

  • APJ Abdul Kalam, a great politician who was president of India until his death in 2015. I remember many of my colleagues in Mahindra École Centrale (where I taught in 2014/15 in India) to be strong supporters of APJ Abdul Kalam ;

  • Arnold Schwarzenegger, for his amazing actor carreer but most importantly his political carreer in the USNA, and ecological convictions. He is trully a hero of the 20th and 21st century, and his Twitter and other social media can be a true source of inspiration (see this 6min talk from 10th of January 2021). Also, he was Conan, Terminator and he killed the Predator, that’s something ;

  • Angela Merkel ;

  • I have more names, including some important women, in mind, TODO: write them ;

Inspirational science

My 10 favorite mathematical results

  • Euclide’s proof of the theorem that states that there exists an infinite number of prime numbers (proof in one line: if there are only \(p_1,\dots,p_n\) as prime numbers, write \(N = p_1 \times p_n + 1\) then it’s a prime number too, larger than each: error!) ;

  • Lagrangian interpolation of polynomials, and one of its consequence that I discovered « myself » in 2009. I was programming a lot of my (old) TI-82 graphical calculator at this time, and I wrote tiny programs to compute all the basic things on polynomial, stored as list of their coefficients. Passing from a polynomial \(P\) to a list of its values in some points \((x_1,\dots,x_K)\) is easy, and I was curious to try to do the opposite: if you have some data point, can you be sure that they are on the graph of a polynomial, and if so, find it? The answer, of course, is (sadly) no! thanks to Lagrangian interpolation, you can easily take an infinite family of polynomials, with increasing degrees, each exactly on this list of pair of points and values!

  • Being able to write the n-th \(u_n\) term of recurrent linear sequence of order k as a result of a \(k \times k\) matrix A to the power k multiplied by a vector, and computing the power by a Straßen method combined with fast exponentiation (leading to an algorithm in \(\mathcal{O}(\log_2(k) n^{\log_2(7)})\) instead of \(\mathcal{O}(k n^3)\)) ;

  • Pascal triangle, and its relationships with binomial coefficients, and many other things (e.g., Sierpinski triangle) ;

  • Indecidability of the halting problem, as well as Gödel incompleteness theorems, which lay down limits of what is unreachable in mathematics and computer science ;

  • Confluence of the lambda-calculus? Not really, I just have an awesome memory of its proof by Jean Goubaut-Larrecq in PROG2 in 2012 at ENS Cachan!

  • The results about which rational and reals numbers can be constructed by a straithedge and a compass, which I studied a lot in 2009/2010. I find it amazing that we have theorems such as Wantzel’s theorem, and clean and understable proofs of impossibility results!

  • Bézier curves, and Casteljau algorithms, are awesome because they are so simple yet so efficient and helpful in computer-assisted design, web design and CSS, and vector graphics in general. I studied this in 2011 and liked it very much!

  • Cook-Levin’s theorem about the NP-completeness of 3-CNF-SAT has a very elegant yet natural proof, and I love it. It’s my favorite proof to present on a black-board in 15 minutes (🇫🇷 « développement d’informatique ») for the computer science minor in national competitive exam to become a teacher in mathematics (🇫🇷 « agrégation de mathématiques »)

  • Last but not least, the Binomial theorem, and its application to limited series development and computation of \(\pi\) by Newton (see this video) ;

My 10 favorite algorithms

  • Euclide’s algorithm for the computation of Greatest Common Divisors, as one of the earliest example of recursive algorithm ;

  • Babylonia method to compute square roots, and its generalization as the Newton’s method to find roots of a continuous function ;

  • Gauss-Karatsuba algorithm to compute product of large polynomials or long integers ;

  • Quick exponentiation to compute quickly exponential (\(x^n\)) and Straßen algorithm to compute quickly matrix products, and their (not well-known) combination to compute \(n \times n\) matrix exponentials like \(A^k\) in \(\mathcal{O}( \log_2(k) n^{\log_2(7)} )\) rather than \(k n^3\) ;

  • Robin-Milner typing algorithm as the foundations of OCaml and ML-like strongly-typed programming languages ;

  • Cocke-Younger-Kasami for lexical analysis for regular grammars in normal Chomsky form ;

  • Fast Fourier Transform and its applications, one my favorite algorithms to teach (for « maths agrégation option informatique » in France), see this notebook ;

  • Upper Confidence Bounds and similar index-policy in reinforcement learning and especially for multi-armed bandits ;

  • My own « aggregator » expert aggregation algorithm, see this page and this article (HAL-01705292) ;

  • Cocktail sort as a funny named sorting algorithm, and bubble sort especially because of this famous video featuring Barack Obama:

My 10 favorite FOSS projects

FOSS means Free and Open-Source software.

  • The Wikimedia and Wikipedia projects (wikimedia.org, wikipedia.org), which is too well-known for me to dare presenting it. It is one of the most important and widely used website, all around the world. All of its content, in more than 150 languages, has been and continues to be entirely created by volunteers, and running on open-source software (like MediaWiki, number 1 wiki software), and using free and open resources (Creative Commons licensed) ;

  • The entire GNU project, since its creation, as the first FOSS project and one of the most widely used and most important. The GNU project include GNU Nano and GNU Emacs, GNU C compiler and GCC, and many others ;

  • The Mozilla projects (mozilla.org) mainly Mozilla Firefox the best web browser ever, and Mozilla Thunderbird an excellent email and news feed client ;

  • The OpenStreetMap project (openstreetmap.org), a solid alternative to Google Maps and other online map websites and apps, entirely drawn and created by volunteers and entirely running on open-source software and using free and open resources (Creative Commons licensed) ;

  • cURL, the best example of a project which seems to just be curl, a tiny CLI (command line interface) program but is instead one of the most widely used library of all-time with more than 20 billions devices using it, being mainly developed and maintained by one developer since 21 years!

  • The Python language, and especially the CPython interpreter. It is one the most loved and widely adopted programming languages of all times, and for good reasons! I have been a long time Python enthusiast since 2012, and I love teaching it and teaching using it! See python.html and skulpt.html for online Python consoles in this website, and learn-python.en.html for a few advices to learn Python ;

  • The Matplotlib plotting library, especially the XKCD mode. For someone like me who first learned (in 2009) to program on a TI-82 calculator and using Maple©, then using MATLAB and C with CUDA and VTK, using a really powerful and clean plotting library like Matplotlib is a relief. I have been using Matplotlib since 2013 and could not work without it! (just kidding, using GNUPlot, TikZ or other Python/Julia plotting library like Gadfly)

  • The OCaml language (ocaml.org), a great example of an indistrial-strength tool produced by professional French researchers since more than 25 years ;

  • Visual Studio Code (code.visualstudio.com), a great example of what a world-leading company in computer technologies can achieve if they decide to go open-source: VSCode has been much more successful and broadly adopted than Visual Studio, or any other IDE or editors. It seems to now be the most widely used IDE in the world (as of 2021), and for good reasons: see visualstudiocode.en.html to learn my opinion about VSCode ;

  • For the last one I want to include, I can’t decide between:

    • The VLC multi-media player : one of the most widely used player in the world, if not the top one, which started as a student project by a few students at Ecole Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupélec, from which I graduated my PhD) ;

    • The Solarus project (solarus-games.com), an amazing open-source game engine which was written and used to develop awesome Zelda-clone games ;

    • The Sphinx Python documentation generator (sphinx-doc.org) (which powers this website since 2012!) ;

    • gmusicbrowser (gmusicbrowser.org), a tiny but awesome music player, that I’ve loved using daily (constantly) since 2016 (I think) ;

    • The F-Froid project (f-droid.org) to allow people to have Android phones and install FOSS apps without using Google Play app stores ;

    • Other projects like: ownCloud for online backup, Jitsi Meet for video calls, tableaunoir for a digital blackboard, Jupyter notebooks, etc.

    • Finally, the last but not the least, the CRANS student association from ENS Cachan (now Paris-Saclay), which has been the Internet provider of about 1200 students each year since the end of the 1990s, using only open-source software.

Cooking and food

For more, see this blog where I write my favorite recipes! (in French).

My 10 favorite spices

  • Garlic ;

  • Cinnamon ;

  • Curry (mix of spices) and especially what is sold in France as « Madras curry » (orange curry) ;

  • Salt ;

  • Red chili ;

  • Black and red pepper ;

  • Ginger ;

  • Clove (« clou de girofle » in French) ;

  • Zaatar (mix of spices) ;

  • Vanilla.

My 10 favorite raw ingredients

  • Tomato in summer ! Fresh and tasty tomatoes, especially black tomatoes or cherry tomatoes ;

  • Eggplant, in summer ! Boiled or fried, in the oven or in a pan, I just love eggplants!

  • Olives, for apéro or cooking, from Greece or Nyons in France ;

  • Leek, all year long but more in winter, raw or cooked, steamed or fried, I love leek! It’s also the emblem of Wales! And it’s fun because in French the Pokémon Farfetch’d is called « Canarticheau » so its name has no link with Leek, despite the graphics showing it holding a leek!

  • Pasta, all year long ;

  • Chicken eggs, especially cooked in a pan or fried ;

  • Sweet potato and potatoes, all year long and cooked in many different ways, mostly steamed or fried ;

  • Lentils, especially coral and beluga, and split peas ;

  • Pumpkins, especially the kind which is sold in France as « potimarrons » (couldn’t find a good translation, red kuri squash?)

My 10 favorite cheeses

With their French names:

  • Abondance and Beaufort, and to a lesser extent Comté, from Jura and Savoie in France ;

  • Parmesan (from Italy) ;

  • Camembert from Normandy in France ;

  • Roquefort (goat blue cheese) from Roquefort in France ;

  • Saint Maure (goat white cheese) from France ;

  • Saint-Félicien and Saint-Marcellin from south-east France ;

  • Reblochon and his younger brother « fromage à tartiflette » from Savoie in France ;

  • Cantal, Laguiole and Salers from south-west France ;

  • Pélardon and picodon from south-east and Provence in France ;

  • Ossau-iraty from south-west in France.

My 10 favorite meat and fish?

NONE ! I am a strict vegetarian since 2018, and proud to be one! Please go read more about the negative ecological and economical impact of consuming meat! (in French, https://www.viande.info/ is a great website)

My 10 favorite meals in France

  • Tartiflette, without sliced pork meat but great cheese ;

  • Raclette in Savoie, with no meat but best quality cheese ;

  • « Boîte Chaude » in France, kinda like a cheese fondue but simpler to cook and as tasty ;

  • Chestnut log (Christmas desert) by my grand-mother (recipe) ;

  • Salted vegetable and cheese pies (« tartes salées ») by my mother ;

  • Galettes in Brittany, especially with goat cheese, honey, nuts, and a side salad!

  • Crêpes by my father or my pancakes, especially with sugar and butter, or sugar and lemon juice, or chestnut spread… ;

  • Kouign amann in Brittany, especially the ones sold in city center of Saint-Malo by the shop « Les kouign amann de Saint-Malo » ;

  • Apple pies by my grand-mother ;

  • Carbonnade flamande, when I use to eat meat, with tasty potato fries ;

Voir aussi

This blog where I write my favorite recipes!.

My 10 favorite meals around the world

  • Vegetarian biryani in India (especially Hyderabad where I lived in 2014/15, which is often considered as the capital of biryani in India!) ;

  • Cheese fondue in Switzerland! Even if we eat this meal a lot in France, it’s from Switzerland!

  • Pizza in Italy! Especially this or that kind, no I’m just kidding I love all pizzas!

  • Vegetarian burgers, for example I had the best burger of my life in Madrid in Spain in 2018 ;

  • Pasta in Italy! Especially pastas with green pesto sauce!

  • « Greek salad » in Greece! The best salads I had in my life were in Athens in 2017!

  • Lassi (drinkable yogurt) and Kulfi (ice-cream) in India, the best ones were in Jaipur ;

  • Curry wurst with fries, as the best street food in Germany (in Berlin in 2013!) ;

  • Vegetarian couscous, the best I had was in Morroco in 2019 for my last conference during my PhD thesis (WCNC’19 in Marrakech) ;

  • And the last but not the least, Libanese dishes like houmous, in a Libanese restaurant in France or elsewhere.

Computer programming and computer things

My other favorite things

In order of preference (first means 😍) :

  • Operating Systems: XUbuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora ;

  • Fonts: I loved FiraCode, which is awesome for developers but it was confusing for my teaching activities in 2019 so I stopped using it. Nowadays I use mainly Fira Mono by Mozilla, and Ubuntu Mono for monospace fonts (for code), and I love TeX Gyre Pagella (open-source alternative to Palatino (in LaTeX, \usepackage{tgpagella} is enough) ;

  • Text editors: Visual Studio Code (see this page), Jupyter notebook, GNU Nano, Sublime Text 3, GNU Emacs (tuareg mode for OCaml) ;

  • Days of the year: 31st of August (last day before new scholar year, and a good memory of a loved one), 21st of March (first day of spring, I love spring), 14th of March (Pi Day, and International Mathematician Day), 4th of May (Star Wars day!), 21st of June (longest day! victory of light over darkness!), 31st of October (not because of Halloween), 17th of February (birthday of my best friend, and many good memories), and not the 12th of January as I’m not especially a big fan of my own birthday ;

  • Other: see my-favorite-tools.en.html for a detailed list of my favorite computer tools.

My 10 favorite languages

  1. Python is without a doubt my favorite language.

  2. GNU Bash, is my second favorite language. You can do so much in just a few lines, I love it.

    • I use it daily as my shell, and wrote so many tiny scripts that I regularly rediscover some of the old ones…

    • I use it for my uLogMe fork for self-quantified on your laptop,

  3. OCaml, is my third favorite language, even if I mainly used and use it for teaching it (see this list) ;

  4. Julia that I discovered during my PhD thesis, I love it but unfortunately I didn’t use it as much as I would have liked it. I published two tiny packages on Julia Pkg manager ;

  5. LaTeX, is not exactly a programming languages (even though it is Turing complete) but the best typesetting system in the world - I love it! Of course I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX (on GitHub), and all my research articles in LaTeX. I use LaTeX for slides of course, and many other use. I am proud to have tried stupid experiments, like this one using Pokémon instead of page numbers ;

  6. Javascript, even if I’m not an expert user, I did write a few projects in Javascript, usually by using a lot of code from other people, like this awesome Turing machine simulator that I translated to French ;

  7. HTML and CSS (I know they’re not programming languages, duh), same remarks I use them a lot for web-pages and visualizations online ;

  8. Markdown (and to a lesser extent reStructuredText) ;

  9. Java ? Haha no, I don’t like it - I would rather have to write MATLAB/Octave again !

  10. And other that I would like to learn more: GoLang, Rust, TypeScript.