Tag Archives: Kyoto

Kyoto, Lecture 1

Today, I will give the very first lecture of the 数学・数理科学グローバル特別講義6について, at Kyoto University.

2025/11/04 火 09:30 – 11:30
2025/11/05 水 09:30 – 11:30
2025/11/10 月 09:30 – 11:30
2025/11/11 火 09:30 – 11:30
2025/11/13 木 09:30 – 11:30
The course will be located at 3号館127大会議室. Lecture notes are also available online.

数学・数理科学グローバル特別講義6

My upcoming lectures at Kyoto University as part of the Global Special Lecture Series in Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences (No. 6) is now on the agenda: November 4, 5, 10, 11, and 13, 2025, from 9:30 till 11:30, at the Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University.

It will be one “Fairness and Distribution in Insurance – An Actuarial Perspective”. We will explore how fairness, risk sharing, and distributional concerns intersect with actuarial science and insurance, providing both theoretical insights and practical implications.

I am truly honored to contribute to this international program and look forward to engaging with students and colleagues in Kyoto.

Global Mathematics Lecture IV, Kyoto University

this Fall I will give the “Global Mathematics Lecture IV” at Kyoto University, a series open to all graduate students across the university (not limited to mathematics). My talk will focus on “algorithmic discrimination in predictive models”, based on Insurance, Biases, Discrimination and Fairness (published last year), with a particular emphasis on applications in insurance, a topic especially relevant for students in the actuarial/insurance track of the MSc program in the Department of Mathematics. Looking forward to engaging discussions with the students!

Kyoto (京都), Japan, vs. Montréal, Canada, a first comparison

We just arrived in Kyoto (京都), Japan, from Montréal, Canada. Everything seems very different. I still have in mind the time I spent in Hong Kong (more than a year), but that was 25 years ago… Just to compare, I used wikipedia’s page of Kyoto vs. Montréal. Quite naturaly, I used the pages in French, but that was not stupid because the pages in English are more compex to read (with temperatures in °C and °F, humidity in mm and inches, etc).

urlM="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montr%C3%A9al"
urlK="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto"
download.file(urlM,destfile = "tempMtrl.html")
download.file(urlK,destfile = "tempKt.html")
library(XML)

Then we extract the tables with important informations

tables=readHTMLTable("tempKt.html")
TK=tables[[6]]
TK[] <- lapply(TK, function(col) {
if (is.character(col)) {
col <- gsub(",", ".", col)
col <- gsub("\\s", "", col)
}
suppressWarnings(as.numeric(col))
})
tables=readHTMLTable("tempMtrl.html")
TM=tables[[7]][,-1]
TM[] <- lapply(TM, function(col) {
if (is.character(col)) {
col <- gsub("\u2212", "-", col)
col <- gsub(",", ".", col)
col <- gsub("\\s", "", col)
}
suppressWarnings(as.numeric(col))
})

and we plot them

cols <- paste0("V", 2:13)
mois <- c("JAN","FEB","MAR","APR","MAY","JUN","JUL","AUG","SEP","OCT","NOV","DEC")
yminK <- suppressWarnings(as.numeric(TK[2, cols]))
ymaxK <- suppressWarnings(as.numeric(TK[3, cols]))
yminM <- suppressWarnings(as.numeric(TM[2, cols]))
ymaxM <- suppressWarnings(as.numeric(TM[3, cols]))
y0K <- pmin(yminK, ymaxK, na.rm = TRUE)
y1K <- pmax(yminK, ymaxK, na.rm = TRUE)
y0M <- pmin(yminM, ymaxM, na.rm = TRUE)
y1M <- pmax(yminM, ymaxM, na.rm = TRUE)
x <- seq_along(cols)
plot(NA,
xlim = c(0.5, length(cols) + 0.5),
ylim = range(y0M, y1M, y0K, y1K, na.rm = TRUE),
xaxt = "n", xlab = "", ylab = "",
main = "Temperatures min-max (°C, averages)")
axis(1, at = x, labels = mois)
w <- 0.8
for (i in x) {
if (!is.na(y0[i]) && !is.na(y1[i])) {
rect(i - w/2, y0K[i], i + w/2, y1K[i],
col = "lightblue", border = "steelblue", lwd = 1.2)
}
}
for (i in x) {
if (!is.na(y0[i]) && !is.na(y1[i])) {
rect(i - w/2, y0M[i], i + w/2, y1M[i],
col = "lightcoral", border = "firebrick", lwd = 1.2)
}
}
grid(nx = NA, ny = NULL, col = "gray85")

with Kyoto in blue, Montréal in red,

of course, we can do the same for humidity

or daylight

暑いですね (atsuidesune, litt. “It’s so hot, isn’t it?”)