Sabrina Ouazzani, winner of the L’Oréal Unesco 2018 Fellowship

Sabrina Ouazzani’s work focuses on “computability in infinite time”. To understand the concepts behind these terms, we must go back to 1930, the birth of the programming logic that gave birth to today’s digital. Little by little, the researchers realized that there are questions that can not be solved using an algorithm (ie following calculations, actions to be performed in a specific order to arrive at the result) and it was then that computability came into being. This discipline, at the heart of fundamental computing, aims to characterize and classify the problems that can be solved by a computer.

Sabrina Ouazzani is particularly interested in calculability in infinite time: assuming that the machine has an infinite time to make calculations, can we collect information at the end of this infinite time that will then make it possible to advance the problem ? This is close to the notion of “limit” used in mathematics. But the researcher’s work goes further: what if, after this infinite time, the calculations were repeated over an infinite time? Then again on an infinite number, and so on? These successive infinites, called ordinals, could make it possible to fix an innovative framework to apprehend the computer science of tomorrow.

The L’Oréal-UNESCO fellowship program “For Women and Science”, awarded in partnership with the Academy of Sciences and the French National Commission for UNESCO, encourages the emergence of a new balance of power in the scientific world. The 9 winners, selected from over 900 other nominations for the excellence of their project, the originality of their scientific project and their desire to pass on their passion to the youngest, will each benefit, in addition to a research grant of 15 000 € for doctoral students and 20 000 € for post-doctoral students, a training program complementary to their scientific background in order to have the means to break the glass ceiling.

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