Borel and the Emergence of Probability on the Mathematical Scene in France

: In 1928, the Henri Poincaré Institute opened in Paris thanks to the efforts of the mathematician Emile Borel and the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Teaching and research on the mathematics of chance were placed by Borel at the center of the institute’s activity, a result imposed by the French mathematicians in the face of indifference and even hostility towards a discipline accused of a lack of seriousness. This historical account, based in large part on the results of Matthias Cléry’s thesis, presents the way in which Borel became convinced of the importance of making up for the gap between France and other countries as regards the place of probability and statistics in the educational system, and elaborates the strategy that led to the creation of the IHP and how its voluntarist functioning enabled it to become in ten years one of the main world centers of reﬂection on this subject.