Claire Voisin and the strength of abstraction

The 2016 CNRS Gold Medal was awarded to the mathematician Claire Voisin. This distinction came as recognition for her major contributions to Complex Algebraic Geometry. Famous for her original and multifarious research, she won numerous rewards and has achieved exceptional international credit.
In this portrait, Claire Voisin takes a look back on her career and enthuses over the endless questions raised by mathematics. As a CNRS researcher for more than thirty years and rewarded on many occasions, she now holds the Chair of Algebraic Geometry at the Collège de France and has thus become the first woman to join the institution as a mathematician.
Claire Voisin has developed abstract mathematics at the intersection of several fields of knowledge, as a result of remarkable intuition and extreme cogency. Her research is dedicated to Algebraic Geometry (the study of the properties of sets characterized by an algebraic equation system) and simultaneously explores three very different comportments of mathematics, i.e., topology, complex geometry and algebraic geometry. She has spent much of her work on the Hodge conjecture - which is one of the millennium prize problems - and its Grothendieck's generalized version.