Claude Allegre
| Claude Allègre | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| French Minister of Education | |
|
In office 4 June 1997 – 28 March 2000 |
|
| President | Jacques Chirac |
| Prime Minister | Lionel Jospin |
| Preceded by | François Bayrou |
| Succeeded by | Jack Lang |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
31 March 1937 Paris, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Political party | Socialist Party |
Claude (Jean) Allègre (French pronunciation: [klodaˈlɛɡʁ]; born 31 March 1937, Paris) is a French politician and scientist.
The main scientific area of Claude Allègre was geochemistry. Allègre co-authored an Introduction to geochemistry in 1974. Since the 1980s, he mainly publishes popular science and political books.
In 1976, Allègre and volcanologist Haroun Tazieff had an intense, very public quarrel about whether inhabitants should evacuate the surroundings of the erupting la Soufrière volcano in Guadeloupe. Allègre, who was speaking outside his area of immediate expertise, held that inhabitants should be evacuated, while Tazieff held that the Soufrière was harmless because all analyses pointed to a purely phreatic eruption with no sign of fresh magma. In part out of caution, the authorities decided to follow Allègre's advice and evacuate. The eruption did not result in any damage, except for the very significant disruption caused by the evacuation itself. Allègre, as the director of Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, subsequently expelled Tazieff from that institute. The controversy dragged on for many years after the end of the eruption, and ended up in court.
Claude Allègre is an ISI highly cited researcher. He is retired and diminished by a 2013 infarctus, but retains an emeritus status at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Institute of Geophysics in Paris).
A former member of the French Socialist Party, Allègre is better known to the general public for his past political responsibilities, which include serving as Minister of Education of France in the Jospin cabinet from 4 June 1997 to March 2000, when he was replaced by Jack Lang. His outpourings of often unjustified critiques against teaching personnel, as well as his reforms, made him increasingly unpopular in the teaching world. In 1996, Allegre published La Défaite de Platon, ("The defeat of Plato"), described by mathematician Pierre Schapira in the Spring 1997 edition of Mathematical Intelligencer as "one of the most savage broadsides against conceptual thought (or just against thought?)"
...
Wikipedia