You enjoyed math as a child, but didn’t see yourself pursuing it. Why not?

There’s the magic of a proof — the emotion you feel when you understand it, when you realize how strong it is and how strong it makes you. As a child, I could already see this. And I enjoyed the concentration that mathematics requires. It’s something that, getting older, I find more and more central to the practice of mathematics. The rest of the world disappears. Your whole brain exists to study a problem. It’s an extraordinary experience, one that’s very important to me — to make yourself leave the world of practical things, to inhabit a different world. Maybe this is why my son enjoys playing video games so much.

But what made me a latecomer to mathematics, in some sense, is that I am absolutely not interested in games. It’s not for me. And in high school, mathematics felt like a game. It was hard for me to take it seriously. I didn’t see the depths of mathematics at first. Even when I started to discover very interesting proofs and theorems after high school, at no point did I think that I could invent something myself, that I could make it mine.

I had a need for something deeper, more serious, something that I could make mine.

Before you found that in math, where did you look for it?

I enjoyed philosophy and its insistence on the notion of a concept. Also, until I was around 22, I spent a lot of time painting, especially figurative pieces inspired by geometry. And I was very fond of poetry — of the work of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, René Char. I was already living in a sort of different world. But that’s normal, I think, when you are younger.

But mathematics became more and more important. It really takes all of your brain. When you are not at your desk working on a specific problem, your mind is still busy. So the more I did mathematics, the less I painted. I only recently started painting again, now that my children have all left the house and I have much more time.

What made you decide to devote most of your creative energy to math in the end?

Mathematics became more and more interesting to me. As a master’s and Ph.D. student, I discovered that the mathematics of the 20th century was something very deep and extraordinary. It was a world of ideas and concepts. In algebraic geometry, there was the famous revolution led by Alexander Grothendieck. Even before Grothendieck, there were incredible results. So it’s a recent field, with ideas that are beautiful but also extremely powerful. Hodge theory, which I study, was part of that.

It became more and more clear that my life was there. Of course, I had a family life — a husband and five children — and other duties and activities. But I realized that with mathematics, I could create something. I could devote my life to it, because it was so beautiful, so spectacular, so interesting.