mathematician Director of Research at National Center for Scientific Research
Bousquet-Mélou studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1986 to 1990, earning an agrégation in mathematics in 1989. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Bordeaux in 1991, with a dissertation on the enumeration of orthogonally convex polyominos supervised by Xavier Gérard Viennot. She joined National Center for Scientific Research as a junior researcher in 1990, and completed a habilitation at Bordeaux in 1996.
Bousquet-Mélou won the bronze medal of the National Center for Scientific Research in 1993, and the silver medal in 2014. Linköping University gave her an honorary doctorate in 2005, and the French Academy of Sciences gave her their Charles-Louis de Saulces de Freycinet Prize in 2009. In 2006, she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in the section on combinatorics. Her presentation at the congress concerned connections between enumerative combinatorics, formal language theory, and the algebraic structure of generating functions, according to which enumeration problems whose generating functions are rational functions are often isomorphic to regular languages, and problems whose generating functions are algebraic are often isomorphic to unambiguous context-free languages.
