[UNE PROF EN France] Élisabeth Borne, a lease of 49.3 days?

The time is paradoxical: on the one hand, it is the holidays, between Christmas and New Year, and we must therefore be joyful; on the other hand, we are being served a new government made of old leftovers kept in the fridge a little too long and embellished with a large pile of debt, which can reasonably make us morose…

It's like a Proust madeleine, a little nostalgic sequence: I was taking my baccalaureate when Mr. Bayrou was Minister of National Education. However, it is not always in old pots that we make the best soup, especially when they have been poorly washed and we would like to change the recipe. It was still a nice little gift slipped under the tree, these 35 transforming Pokémon with multiple evolutions, capable of successively filling all the positions of the great national team. We can only win when we invest so much public money in 35 players at 10,647 euros per month, material benefits excluded. Attal only had a team of 29 players, Borne of 23, Édouard Philippe of 19, Valls of 18, Fillon of 15… The further France goes down the ranking, the more the team grows around the captain. Afterwards, my childish soul is delighted: “Minister of the Forest and the Sea”, this projects us into an episode of Winx, an anime that my daughters loved and whose heroines were Leïla, “fairy of Fluids and Sea”, and Flora, “fairy of Nature and Flowers”…

But let's focus on National Education. I just saw a little video that amused me and I decided to share it with you to lighten up this sinking end of the year a little.

Wonderwomath, a young woman who popularizes mathematics on the networks, looked for a mathematical model to predict the survival time of Élisabeth Borne in National Education.
She noted the length of mandates of Ministers of National Education under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron. 1,829 days for Blanquer, 426 days for Ndiaye, 173 days for Attal, 28 days for Oudéa-Castéra, 159 days for Belloubet, 93 days for Genetet. We therefore clearly see a downward trend, “ but for Oudéa-Castéra, we have a value that does not correspond to this trend: in mathematics, we call that an outlier ”, and she chooses to delete it. It graphically represents this sequence, and the last point has the coordinates (4.93): we could have predicted the arrival of Ms. Borne at Education…

She then looks for a precise mathematical model that can establish, using the data, a trend curve, using an Excel™ spreadsheet. It eliminates inconclusive models: neither the exponential trend curve, nor the linear, nor the polynomial, nor the logarithmic. But the “power” model seems interesting and she chooses it. The coefficient of determination is very close to 1, so it is “really a very satisfactory model”. She then asks the spreadsheet to display the equation of the curve, then she goes “ use this model to predict the duration of the next mandate, represented by point F, that of Ms. Borne. And the mathematical model predicts this duration: approximately 63.3 days. If we take away 2 weeks of school holidays, incredible: 49.3 days! » If the math says so!

Happy New Year 2025 to everyone!