Jean Zeitoun in brief

Jean was born in Tunis in 1941. After studying at Lycée Carnot, he leaves Tunisia to attend preparatory classes for the grandes écoles. He enters Polytechnique school (l’X) in 1961 and subsequently graduates from Ponts et chaussées school in 1966.

 

From the early seventies, Jean becomes one of the pioneers in conceiving and introducing synthesis images in France. He combines artificial intelligence and natural langage which the researchers are not yet familiar with. Within the different research laboratories that he manages, he creates possibilities for developing software that uses these processes in architectural conception, industrial design, and artistic creation. 

 

Jean manages and organizes different research laboratories for nearly forty years: from the Centre méthodologie, mathématiques, informatique (MMI) within l’Institut de l’environnement to the Centre informatique méthodologie en architecture (CIMA), and MOST and TextAgent companies that he founds in the early ’90s. These structures are the hub of many innovations and software conceptions at the forefront. They use simulation, artificial and natural language at a time when these notions were still incipient in France. Jean shares his work with international laboratories, including the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

 

At the MOST company, he investigates software developments in the industrial sector, including the aerospatial domain with his business partners. He conceives safety-reliability procedures which are still in use today.

 

Meanwhile, Jean carries on teaching and relaying his knowledge with young multidisciplinary research teams (computing, semiology, graphism, mathematics, and statistics) but also in specialized schools.

 

Up to this day, the scientific work initiated by Jean in his laboratories as well as his numerous publications is the subject of doctoral theses, exegeses, and comprehensive inventories.

 

More recently, far from the constraints of management, he has found himself invested in his favorite topics (acquired through Louis Leprince-Ringuet’s teaching at l’X school), which are astrophysics, cosmology, and the sciences of the universe, not to mention quantum physics and astrobiology. Until a few months ago, he was hosting “open astrophysics mornings,” three times a week for a lay audience.