An optimistic academic
Jean-Claude Falmagne, the 91-year-old cognitive sciences research professor who continues to call UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences home after more than three decades, has made an indelible mark on the field of mathematical psychology.
He’s worked on standard topics of mathematical psychology, such as psychophysics, choice theory, and learning theory, but also knowledge spaces and scientific meaningfulness. The latter, Falmagne says in reflecting on his long career, are his most important scientific accomplishments.
Yet not content with academic impact alone, he turned one of his theories into an online educational system that is today used by millions of students worldwide. He then used the windfall of his company’s sale to create another legacy by establishing three endowed chairs that have cemented UC Irvine’s reputation for excellence in mathematical psychology.
“What’s striking to me, and so many of us who work with Jean-Claude, is that he has an optimistic view on everything,” says Eric Cosyn, Ph.D. ’00, who was a graduate student of Falmagne’s and co-founder of the company, ALEKS, an acronym for Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces. “What’s made the optimism fruitful is that he started with solid ideas, has a way of getting the right people together, and is not afraid to keep trying when others might have given up.”
An accidental psychologist
Falmagne sometimes describes his path to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated mathematical psychologists as an accident. As a young man in Belgium, he completed mandatory military service in 1954 and briefly attempted a career as an insurance salesman. Then one day, his father announced – without any discussion – that he had enrolled his son in the psychology department at Université Libre de Bruxelles. It was a prescient choice.
Falmagne was a shining success as an undergraduate and graduate student, applying mathematical principles to human behavior, with his early research focusing on reaction times. He won a Fulbright Fellowship in 1966 that brought him to the U.S. where he held post-doctoral positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at New York University, Falmagne spent a year teaching in Paris, where he founded the European Mathematical Psychology Group, which continues to host an annual symposium more than a half-century later. In fact, the group honored its founder’s 70th birthday with the Falmagne Symposium in 2004. (Hear Falmagne reflect on his lifetime’s work in this 2020 interview, when he won the inaugural Society for Mathematical Psychology Senior Fellow Award.)
Space for new theories
At NYU, Falmagne joined several internationally renowned mathematical psychologists, including George Sperling, who is now a UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of cognitive sciences and neurobiology and behavior. The graduate students Falmagne mentored during his 15 years there included Geoffrey Iverson and Charlie Chubb, who today are both professors of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine. During these early years of his career, Falmagne expanded his research into choice theory, measurement theory, and psychophysics, and began the development of a new theory for the assessment of knowledge. Falmagne says the acclaimed scholars Duncan Luce, Patrick Suppes and János Aczél were strong intellectual influences on him as he grew in international acclaim, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and, in 1982, a prestigious von Humboldt Award from Germany.
Falmagne began working with his long-time collaborator, the Belgian mathematician Jean-Paul Doignon, to develop seminal theories of knowledge spaces, publishing their foundational paper in 1985. The duo proposed that it was possible to far more precisely measure an individual’s understanding of, say, math or chemistry, than what existed in popular tests like the SAT or AP. Their ideas would lead to many papers and books – and eventually an education company.
In the late 1980s, Falmagne and Luce were recruited by fellow mathematical psychologists Louis Narens and Jack Yellot, who was then-chair of cognitive sciences, to join the University of California, Irvine. Along with Sperling, Iverson and others, these scholars would become founding members of UC Irvine’s new Institute for Mathematical and Behavioral Sciences.
Bringing all of these great minds together in UC Irvine’s Department of Cognitive Sciences certainly attracted global attention among academics. But for Falmagne, it was personal. These scholars had been his collaborators, mentors and friends for years. And, soon after relocating to Southern California, Falmagne married his wife Dina, whom he had met at NYU, and who remains his steadfast partner.
“I’ve heard him say more than once that UC Irvine was at the time the best place for mathematical psychology in the world,” says Dina Falmagne. “And if you cut the department in half any way you wish, each half would still be the best in the world.”
He wasn’t alone in thinking this. Michel Regenwetter, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a university student in Bonn, Germany, when he learned that “UCI was the world’s best place to become a mathematical psychologist.” Drawn to the incredible opportunity to learn from the field’s greats — including Falmagne, Luce, Narens, Iverson and others — Regenwetter came to UC Irvine for graduate school.
“Jean-Claude is one of the giants of mathematical modeling in behavioral science,”
says Regenwetter. “He was incredibly respected when he was active as a scholar, yet
always modest and focused on the research, never on the person. Jean-Claude is a perfect
example of a clear-minded, incorruptible, and always optimistic person.”
Regenwetter says he learned from Falmagne to treat graduate students with as much care and respect as he would his own children. To this day, he considers Falmagne like a second father to him.
“Jean-Claude has taught me most of what makes me a scholar. Two of his most important pieces of advice were: 1. Choose a research project where every possible outcome is a good and lasting outcome (i.e., avoid fashion or open problems). 2. If you do not understand how your data are generated, then you do not understand your research,” says Regenwetter. “I pass these along to as many young scholars as I can.”
Research driven by application
Another tenet of Falmagne’s: “Research is ultimately driven by application,” says Dina Falmagne.
In 1992, Falmagne won a remarkably large grant for the time, $2 million from the National Science Foundation, to build a computer program based on the theories of knowledge spaces and learning spaces, which he had been developing with Doignon for over a decade. With just a few dozen questions, Falmagne’s program could accurately determine not only which problems in the math curriculum a student can solve correctly – the exact one of millions of possible knowledge states a student is in – but also what they are primed to learn next.
“It was a very ambitious grant he applied for and a huge project, but that is very typical of Jean-Claude. He’s not afraid of anything,” says Cosyn, who was the first person Falmagne recruited to help him. “He just went for it and then created a team of researchers and graduate students to make it happen.”
Cosyn, as an undergraduate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, had worked with Doignon, and arrived at UC Irvine as a graduate student just six weeks after his initial phone call with Falmagne. Next, Falmagne recruited engineers Nicolas Thiery and Damien Lauly from a French grande école, an elite engineering school, and they joined the team as cognitive sciences graduate students and software engineers for the project. Lo-Jen Yu was also recruited at the same time as a software engineer. In 1996, Falmagne and these original developers officially founded ALEKS.
Those early years were challenging, marked by endless coding and refining as they worked to build a digital math assessment system that would base each question on how the student answered the previous question – something easily taken for granted in today’s AI era. There were moments when it would have been easier to publish a paper on their findings, and give up on building a marketable product for schools.
“He wanted the theories to be used in education, and he knew that if he just published papers, that would never happen,” recalls Dina Falmagne. “So, even though running a company was foreign to them, they knew they had to do it themselves.”
Benefiting millions
As ALEKS started to fulfill the promise of the theories it was built on, McGraw Hill licensed and distributed the product to schools and universities, and Falmagne brought on additional UC Irvine colleagues to help run the business. The team continued expanding ALEKS, adding chemistry, accounting and statistics to the flagship mathematics assessment and teaching. From the beginning, the instructional component, providing lessons based on what each student needed to learn next, was part of the system.In 2004, Falmagne retired from teaching at UC Irvine, retaining the title of research professor, to focus on growing ALEKS to the point that, in 2013, McGraw Hill purchased the company. Cosyn, Thiery and others have continued growing the platform, which recently introduced a tablet-based module for kindergarteners. Today, thousands of schools and universities around the world use ALEKS, with millions of students annually taking its assessments and lessons. At UC Irvine, thousands of incoming Anteaters use ALEKS in a pre-calculus course, for chemistry preparation, and for calculus placement testing.
“ALEKS has evolved tremendously over the decades, but the foundation from which it was created remains the same,” says Rachel Lehman, a senior lecturer who earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Irvine in 1997 and has worked as a consultant for the company. “Having seen students using ALEKS in my pre-calculus classroom on a daily basis, I can attest that it’s a miraculous program benefiting millions of students.”
Of her experience with Falmagne, Lehman says, “He is a charming, brilliant, kind human being with an open-door policy if you have something to talk about.”
A legacy at home
Immediately after selling ALEKS, Falmagne created an endowment at UC Irvine. It was something the optimistic academic had always wanted to do if it ever became financially feasible, says Dina Falmagne. The couple established three endowed chairs specifying that they were to continue research “in the tradition of Duncan Luce,” who was Falmagne’s colleague, mentor and longtime friend.
“Duncan Luce was the patriarch of mathematical psychology in their time, and Jean-Claude felt his work was worth continuing,” Dina Falmagne says. “So these chairs are dedicated in a very specific way to continue Luce’s line of research.”
The Falmagnes also created a $5 million charitable remainder trust for the university to benefit future generations of researchers and students.
“UC Irvine has become our home,” explains Dina Falmagne.
During more than 35 years in Irvine, the Falmagnes raised their daughter, Sophia – Jean-Claude’s fifth child – who recently returned from medical school and is a resident physician in pediatric neurology at UCI Health.
In honor of Falmagne’s 80th birthday in 2014, UC Irvine hosted a conference on meaningfulness and learning spaces, two of his lasting contributions to the field of mathematical psychology. The following year, he received the Extraordinarius Award, the highest honor bestowed by the UC Irvine Alumni Association. In 2020, he received the inaugural Senior Fellow award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology.
True to the optimism that defines his career, Falmagne’s legacy continues to unfold at UC Irvine and around the world, not only through the many awards celebrating his work, but through the people, programs and learners he has impacted.
-Christine Byrd for UCI Social Sciences
-pictured, courtesy of Dina Falmagne: Jean-Claude Falmagne in Paris. Jean-Claude and
Dina. Falmagne in conversation with colleague Louis Narens.