In collaboration with the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo del Cnr

Geometry, as in Invisible Cities or the Cosmicomics, is at the base of some of Italo Calvino’s short stories. It is also among the contributions made by Audin to the research of Oulipo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or “potential literature workshop” group founded by Raymond Queneau and mathematician-writer François Le Lionnais, which drew a number of mathematicians and writers who, such as Georges Perec and Calvino himself, believed that maths had the potential to organise rigorous literary structures.

Michèle Audin is a mathematician specializing in geometry and a writer. She is a member of the Oulipo and is particularly interested in using geometric constraints to write literary texts. For almost thirty years she was professor of mathematics at the Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) of the Université de Strasbourg, mainly interested in symplectic geometry and its applications to mechanics. She has written numerous mathematical texts and history books, including Souvenirs sur Sofia Kovalevskaïa, Calvage et Mounet, 2008, and some novels published at Gallimard.

During the meeting the Sala Italo Calvino, recently built inside the National Central Library of Rome, will be presented to the public by Dr. Eleonora Cardinale, Head of the office of contemporary archives and libraries.

Informazioni

Entrance ticket to the exhibitions and the meeting: special rate of € 4.00, from 6.00pm, until places last

Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Rotonda

via Nazionale 194