Yoccoz book collection at ICTP

The mathematical books of Michel Herman were donated to IMPA’s library by Jean-Christophe Yoccoz in the early 2000s: it amounts to more than 700 books and the complete list of titles can be found here.

This beautiful gesture of donating the books of a great mathematician to a developing country helped in the training of several mathematicians. In particular, I remember that reading Herman’s books during my PhD at IMPA was a singular experience in two aspects: intellectually, it gave me access to many high level mathematical topics, and olfactively, it was curious to get a smell of cigarette smoke out of old books (rather than the “usual” smell). (As I learned later, this experience was fully justified by the facts that Herman was an avid reader and a heavy smoker.)

Of course, this attitude of Jean-Christophe prompted me to discuss with Stefano Marmi about an appropriate destination in Africa to send Yoccoz’s mathematical books. After some conversations, we contacted ICTP (and, in particular, Stefano Luzzatto) to inquire about the possibility of sending Yoccoz’s books to Senegal (as a sort of “retribution” for the good memories that Jean-Christophe had during his visit to AIMS-Senegal and University of Dakar in December 2011) or Rwanda.

Unfortunately, some organisational difficulties made that we were obliged to split this plan into two parts. More concretely, rather than taking unnecessary risks by rushing to send Yoccoz’s books directly to Africa, last Thursday I sent all of them (a total of 13 boxes weighting approximately 35kg each) to ICTP library, so that they can already be useful to all ICTP visitors — in particular those coming from developing countries — instead of staying locked up in my office (where they were only sporadically read by me). In this way, we get some extra time to carefully think the definitive transfer of Yoccoz’s books to Africa while making them already publicly available.

Anyhow, the next time you visit ICTP, I hope that Yoccoz’s books will help you in some way!