[Profs Mat:9068] Fwd: SAD NEWS: Gerard Vergnaud

It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Gérard Vergnaud, in Paris on June 6, 2021.

Gérard Vergnaud, born in 1933 in Doué-La-Fontaine, France, was Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS. He joined the University of Paris 8 after 1996 in a mixed psychology research team led by Jean-François Richard, after having been a member of the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology at the University of Paris 5 where he led the research group on the didactics of mathematics. A disciple of Jean Piaget, Gérard Vergnaud in his work identified the natural phases of school learning and the experience acquired throughout the development of the child.

At the University of Paris 8, he continued his work in the cognition laboratory and activities mainly focused on didactics, with a dominant mathematics which had been his heart of his research for years and he was increasingly interested skills development and work learning for adults. He thus, with Renan Samurçay, Pierre Pastré and Pierre Rabardel, contributed to the emergence of professional didactics. When it was founded, he joined the C3U ergonomics team at the Paragraphe laboratory. In addition to the thematic aspects which brought him closer to several members of the team who carried out work in mathematics didactics (including Renan Samurçay and Janine Rogalski), the deep agreement with the orientations of the team's researchers in ergonomics and psychology was linked , at the methodological level, to the question of recourse to the field and to the analysis of complex activities in a natural situation, and at the theoretical level to the developmental perspective, crossing the contributions of the Piagetian research current with those of the historico-cultural approach of Soviet psychology and Lev Vygotsky's approach. Relying on the analysis of activity, and its articulations between action and thought, he developed the "theory of conceptual fields", in order to account for the processes by which the organization of knowledge develops. and skills.

Gérard Vergnaud was also a man of activist commitments. An elected member of the scientific governing bodies of the CNRS, he helped to animate the trade union movement in scientific research, in particular at the SNCS, of which he was one of the national leaders.

Gérard Vergnaud has established numerous relationships with researchers and research institutes in Europe (Italy, Switzerland), North and South America (United States, Brazil, Chile), East Asia (South Korea). He is Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Geneva (1995), Central State University of Buenos Aires (2011), member of the International Academy of Psychological Sciences of Russia.

A researcher committed to doctoral training, Gérard Vergnaud has directed more than 80 theses in 25 years, accompanying the unique paths of doctoral students who did not all have a vocation to become researchers but shared the desire to build a science to act with others. Wings were given to them.

With the death of Gérard Vergnaud, the scientific community is losing a very great researcher and an exceptional man, who marked all those who met him, with his great humanity.