Collège de France

Overview

Collège de France

Collège de France is a public research university located in Paris, France. It was founded in 1530 by King Francis I of France and modeled after the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain. It is an associate member of Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL University). This institution does not grant degrees but offers well-attended lectures where attendance is free and open to anyone.

Collège de France Key Statistics

The Collège offers interdisciplinary courses in multiple fields of study, including mathematics and digital sciences, physics and chemistry, sociological sciences, and history and archaeology.

The free and open classes at the Collège are closely followed by various students, from senior researchers and Ph.D. students to masters and undergraduate students. Its academic staff currently includes fifty-two Professors.

Collège de France has one general library and nine specialized libraries including the Byzantine Library, the Library of the Asian Society, the Egyptology Library, the Far East Libraries, and the Library of the Arab, Turkish and Islamic Studies. These libraries hold a collection of rare books that rank amongst the finest in Europe and a bibliographic collection of great variety.

Other Collège de France key statistics include its notable affiliations, which include eight Fields Medalists and 21 Nobel Prize winners. Likewise, its notable faculty includes Serge Haroche, who was awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 2012.

Collège de France Research

The Collège is considered the most prestigious research establishment in France and houses one of the best research libraries in Europe. Its top research areas include humanities, social science, and science.

Collège de France research’s top three fields of study are biology, physics, and chemistry. Its researchers have published in publications like Science, Physical Review Letters, and The Astrophysical Journal. The Collège researchers had been invited to attend and/or present papers at prestigious conferences such as Web Science, the Joint International Conference on Information Sciences, and the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

The most cited article produced by Collège de France research is Perlmutter et al.’s (1999) “Measurements of Ω and Λ from 42 high redshift supernovae,” published in The Astrophysical Journal. It has received a total of 24,010 citations so far. The second most cited paper is Foucault's (1978) “About the concept of the ‘dangerous individual’ in 19th-century legal psychiatry,” published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. It has been cited 14,604 times. Collège’s third most cited study is Reimer et al.’s (2009) “Intcal09 and marine09 radiocarbon age calibration curves, 0–50,000 years cal bp,” published in the Radiocarbon journal. It has been cited by 12,908 papers, articles, and other publications to date.

Collège de France’s research centers and facilities include the Institute of Mathematics and Computational Sciences, the Institute of Biology, the Institute of the Contemporary World, and the Institute of itinerary and Linguistic studies.

The university’s official academic affiliates have been awarded nine Nobel Prizes for Physics, five for Chemistry, seven for Physiology or Medicine, and one for Literature.