I was born in Berlin in 1948; my father was born in Vienna, the capital of  Austria, and my mother in Helsingfors, the capital of  Finland (most people better know the capital of Finland as being Helsinki; but Finland is a bilingual county, and Helsingfors is the name in the country's second official language, which is Swedish) . My parents met in Nice before WWII while studying French, and got married in Saint Tropez after the war was over. My mother got the medal of war from the Finnish leader, Mannerheim, and my father became a French diplomat in post-war Berlin, where I lived my fisrt years. Eventually I moved to Nice, on the French Riviera. It was my grandmother, Natalia Nylund, who triggered my interest in Science in general, and Mathematics in particular. She taught me how to use logarithm tables and extract square roots when I was twelve (this one of the reasons I am interested in Lie algebras and in taking square roots of De Rham forms). In 1962 I moved to Saint Cloud, a residential suburb of Paris. I graduated from High School there, and then moved back to Nice to study mathematics (and some physics as well). Nice was at that time very attractive, not only because of the location, but also because the University of Nice was a stronghold of the Bourbaki school; I had great teachers like J. Dieudonné (he was Dean of Science at that time), L. Boutet de Monvel, A. Martineau, A. Douady. But I did not meet them very often because I worked full-time as a supply math teacher, so I could only study part-time.  I learnt much from the Bourbaki way of doing mathematics, but nowadays I am less convinced about the benefits of the "Bourbachian" view.

I got my PhD at the University of Nice in 1978 and a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in 1992 at the University of Paris VI, better known by the initiated as "Jussieu". My mentor was Jean Leray from the Collège de France. I was Leray's last student; his mentorship was actually unofficial since he was at that time over 85: place aux jeunes! My Habilitation thesis consisted of a series of papers, on partial differential equations and on a topological and combinatorial study of the Maslov index, with applications to the theory of the metaplectic group.

For a complete CV please go to my professional homepage http://www.freewebs.com/cvdegosson .