100 Notable alumni of Polytechnic School

Antonin Baudry, also known by the writing pseudonym Abel Lanzac, is a French diplomat specializing in cultural affairs, comic book author, screenwriter, and film director.

Bertrand Meyer is a French academic, author, and consultant in the field of programming languages. He created the Eiffel language and the concept of design by contract.

Jean-Christophe Yoccoz was a French mathematician. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994, for his work on dynamical systems.

Paul Quilès was a French Socialist politician.

Jean-François André Clervoy is a French engineer and a CNES and ESA astronaut. He is a veteran of three NASA Space Shuttle missions.

Hervé Le Bras is a French demographer and historian.

Jean-Victor Poncelet was a French engineer and mathematician who served most notably as the Commanding General of the École Polytechnique. He is considered a reviver of projective geometry, and his work Traité des propriétés projectives des figures is considered the first definitive text on the subject since Gérard Desargues' work on it in the 17th century. He later wrote an...

Major André Édouard Marcel Turcat was a French Air Force pilot and test pilot celebrated for flying the first prototype of Concorde for its 1969 maiden flight.

Fabienne Keller is a French politician who has been serving as a Member of the European Parliament since 2019. She was previously the mayor (UDF) of Strasbourg, France, from March 2001 to March 2008.

Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He directed the development of the CYCLADES computer network in France the early 1970s, which implemented a novel design for packet communication. He was the first to implement the end-to-end principle in a wide-area network, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.

Charles-Louis-Eugène Koechlin, commonly known as Charles Koechlin, was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his better known works is Les Heures persanes, a set of piano pieces based on the novel Vers Ispahan by Pierre Loti and The Seven Stars Symphony, a 7 movement symphony where each movement is themed around a different film star (all Silent era stars)...

Alfred Sauvy was a demographer, anthropologist and historian of the French economy. Sauvy made an important early use of the phrase Third World ("Tiers Monde") in reference to countries that were unaligned with either the Western bloc or the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, for which he has often been credited with coining the phrase.

Mirza Melkum Khan was an Iranian modernist writer, diplomat, and publicist. He is known for his social reform efforts, as well as for being the first Christian to adopt the title of 'Mirza' in Persian. He is considered one of the fathers of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.

Michel Floréal Chasles was a French mathematician.

Charles Hermite FRS FRSE MIAS (24 December 1822 – 14 January 1901) was a French mathematician who did research concerning number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.

Ion I. C. Brătianu was a Romanian politician, leader of the National Liberal Party (PNL), Prime Minister of Romania for five terms, and Foreign Minister on several occasions; he was the eldest son of statesman and PNL leader Ion Brătianu, the brother of Vintilă and Dinu Brătianu, and the father of Gheorghe I. Brătianu. Ion I. C. Brătianu's political activities...

Albert Jacquard was a French geneticist, popularizer of science and essayist.

Paul Bert was a French zoologist, physiologist and politician. He is sometimes given the nickname "Father of Aviation Medicine".

Commandant Caroline Aigle was a French aviator who achieved a historical first when at the age of 25, she became the first woman fighter pilot in the French Air Force. Her promising military career was cut short by death from cancer seven years later. She was posthumously awarded the Médaille de l'Aéronautique (Aeronautics Medal).

Guillaume Henri Dufour was a Swiss military officer, structural engineer and topographer. He served under Napoleon I and held the Swiss office of General four times in his career, firstly in 1847 when he led the Swiss Confederation forces to victory against the Sonderbund. In 1864 Dufour presided over the First Geneva Convention which established the International Red Cross. He...

Louis Léon César Faidherbe was a French general and colonial administrator. He created the Senegalese Tirailleurs when he was governor of Senegal.

Claude Bébéar was a French businessman. He was a onetime CEO of AXA.

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was a French astronomer and mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics and is best known for predicting the existence and position of Neptune using only mathematics.

Louis-Eugène Cavaignac was a French general and politician who served as head of the executive power of France from June to December 1848, during the French Second Republic.

Guillaume Faury is a French engineer and businessman. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) at the aerospace corporation Airbus SE and chairman of its civil aircraft division, Airbus SAS.

Petrache Poenaru was a Romanian inventor.

Trần Đại Nghĩa was a Vietnamese scientist, military engineer, and prominent figure in the defense industry of Vietnam. He held the rank of major-general and was recognized as both a military officer and an academician. He was awarded the Order of Ho Chi Minh and honored as a Hero of Labor. He was also elected as an Academician of the...

Jean-Marc Germain is a French politician, member of the Socialist Party. He is the cabinet director of Martine Aubry in Socialist Party, and was elected to the European Parliament in 2024. Germain is also the husband of Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris.

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, often referred to as JJSS, was a French journalist and politician. He co-founded L'Express in 1953 with Françoise Giroud, and then went on to become president of the Radical Party in 1971. He oversaw its transition to the center-right, the party being thereafter known as Parti radical valoisien. He tried to found in 1972 the Reforming Movement with...

Dominique François Jean Arago, known simply as François Arago ( French: [fʁɑ̃swa aʁaɡo]; Catalan: Francesc Aragó, IPA: [fɾənˈsɛsk əɾəˈɣo]; 26 February 1786 – 2 October 1853), was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries, and politician.

Roland Lescure is a French and Canadian banker and politician who served as Minister Delegate for Industry in the governments of successive Prime Ministers Élisabeth Borne and Gabriel Attal from 2022 to 2024.

Baron Siméon Denis Poisson was a French mathematician and physicist who worked on statistics, complex analysis, partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, elasticity, and fluid mechanics. Moreover, he predicted the Arago spot in his attempt to disprove the wave theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel.

Prince Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans was the eldest son of King Louis Philippe I of France and Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily. He was born in exile in his mother's native Sicily while his parents were the Duke and Duchess of Orléans. Ferdinand Philippe was heir to the House of Orléans from birth. Following his father's succession as...

Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry was a French Air Force lieutenant colonel, military air-weaponry engineer and the creator of the Nord SS.10/SS.11 missiles. Bastien-Thiry and multiple colleagues attempted to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle in the Petit-Clamart attack of 22 August 1962 in retaliation for de Gaulle's decision to accept Algerian independence. Bastien-Thiry remains the most recent person to be executed by...

Robert Georges Nivelle was a French artillery general officer who served in the Boxer Rebellion and the First World War. In May 1916, he succeeded Philippe Pétain as commander of the French Second Army in the Battle of Verdun, leading counter-offensives that rolled back the German forces in late 1916. During these actions, he and General Charles Mangin were accused...

Jean Laurent Robert Borotra was a French tennis champion. He was one of the "Four Musketeers" from his country who dominated tennis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Borotra was imprisoned in Itter Castle during the latter years of World War II and subsequently fought in the Battle for Castle Itter.

Bruno Mégret is a French former nationalist politician. He was the leader of the Mouvement National Républicain political party, but retired in 2008 from all political action.

Jules Brunet was a French military officer who served the Tokugawa shogunate during the Boshin War in Japan. Originally sent to Japan as a horse artillery instructor with the French military mission of 1867, he refused to leave the country after the shōgun was defeated, and played a leading role in the separatist Republic of Ezo and its fight against...

Georges Eugène Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. He has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson (whose lectures at the Collège de France he attended), and later William James. His notion of...

André-Gustave Citroën was a French industrialist and the founder of French automaker Citroën. He is also remembered for his application of double helical gears.

Frédéric Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault is a French businessman who has been the CEO of LVMH Watches since 2024, and the CEO of Loro Piana since 2025. He is the second son of billionaire Bernard Arnault and his second wife, Hélène Mercier-Arnault.

Jean-Baptiste Djebbari is a French aircraft pilot and politician of La République En Marche! (LREM).

Nathalie Geneviève Marie Kosciusko-Morizet, often referred to by her initials NKM, is an engineer and former politician.

Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre LH OM GCB was a French general who served as Commander-in-Chief of French forces on the Western Front from the start of World War I until the end of 1916. He is best known for regrouping the retreating allied armies to defeat the Germans at the strategically decisive First Battle of the Marne in September 1914.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was a French military engineer and physicist. A graduate of the École polytechnique, Carnot served as an officer in the Engineering Arm (le génie) of the French Army. He also pursued scientific studies, and in June 1824 published an essay titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. In that book, which would be his only...

Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault is a French businessman. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods company. Arnault is one of the richest individuals in the world; as of December 2025, he has an estimated net worth of US$190.4 billion according to Forbes and US$203 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d'Estaing, also known as simply Giscard or VGE, was a French politician who served as President of France from 1974 to 1981.

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology, with him inventing the very term and treating the discipline as the crowning achievement...

Alfred Dreyfus was a French Army officer best known for his central role in the Dreyfus affair. In 1894, Dreyfus fell victim to a judicial conspiracy that eventually sparked a major political crisis in the French Third Republic when he was wrongfully accused and convicted of being a German spy due to antisemitism. Dreyfus was arrested, cashiered from the French...

Ferdinand Foch LH OM GCB DSO was a French general, Marshal of France and a member of the Académie Française and Académie des Sciences. He distinguished himself as Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front during the First World War in 1918.

Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word...

Hervé Marie David Mariton is a French politician serving as Mayor of Crest since 1995. A member of The Republicans, he was elected to the National Assembly for the third constituency of Drôme from 1993 to 1997 and again from 2002 until 2017, with a brief interruption in 2007, when he was appointed Minister of the Overseas by President Jacques...

Paul Pierre Lévy was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions. Lévy processes, Lévy flights, Lévy measures, Lévy's constant, the Lévy distribution, the Lévy area, the Lévy arcsine law, and the fractal Lévy C curve are named after him.

Patrick Kron was the chairman and chief executive (Président-directeur général) of the French engineering conglomerate Alstom. Alstom is most well known for its TGV trains, and is headquartered at Saint-Ouen.

Charles Louis de Saulces de Freycinet was a French statesman who served four times as Prime Minister during the Third Republic. He also served an important term as Minister of War (1888–1893). He belonged to the Moderate Republican faction.

Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan was a French mathematician, known both for his foundational work in group theory and for his textbook Cours d'analyse de l'École polytechnique.

Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron was a French engineer and physicist, one of the founders of thermodynamics.

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play was a French engineer, sociologist and economist.

Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo was a Spanish "eminent liberal", diplomat, writer, historian and pacifist who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize and awarded the Charlemagne Prize in 1973.

Tidjane Thiam is an Ivorian businessman and politician. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Swiss bank Credit Suisse from March 2015 to February 2020. He was the chief financial officer of British banking group Prudential from 2007 to 2009, and then its CEO until 2015. In 2019, Thiam became a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He...

Patrick Jean Pouyanné is a French businessman and engineer who has been the chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies since 2014.

Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois was a French geologist and mineralogist who was the first to arrange the chemical elements in order of atomic weights, doing so in 1862. De Chancourtois only published his paper, but did not publish his actual graph with the irregular arrangement. Although his publication was significant, it was ignored by chemists as it was written in...

Henry Louis Le Chatelier was a French chemist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He devised Le Chatelier's principle, used by chemists to predict the effect a changing condition has on a system in chemical equilibrium.

Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks (Value and Capital, 1939) and Paul Samuelson (The Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947), to neoclassical synthesis. They formalize the self-regulation of...

Carlos Ghosn is a businessman and former automotive executive. He was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Michelin North America, chairman and CEO of Renault, chairman of AvtoVAZ, chairman and CEO of Nissan, and chairman of Mitsubishi Motors.

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. He has further been called "the Gauss of modern mathematics". Due to his success in science, along...

Albert François Lebrun was a French politician who served as President of France from 1932 to 1940. He was the last president of the Third Republic. He was a member of the centre-right Democratic Republican Alliance (ARD).

Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French engineering consultant, energy and climate expert, professor, conference speaker, writer, and independent columnist. He is co-founder and associate at the Carbone 4 consultancy firm, and the founding president of the think-tank The Shift Project.

Jean-Bernard Lévy is a French businessman, and was the CEO and chairman of EDF.

Patrick Drahi is a French–Israeli billionaire magnate and investor with interests in media and telecoms. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of the European-based telecom group Altice, and the majority owner of the international auction house Sotheby's. He lives in Switzerland.

Serge Dassault was a French engineer, businessman and politician. He was the chairman and chief executive officer of Dassault Group, and a conservative politician. According to Forbes, Dassault's net worth was estimated in 2016 at US$15 billion.

Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him...

Christel Heydemann is a French businesswoman and the chief executive officer (CEO) of the French telecommunications company Orange S.A. since 4 April 2022.

Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy was a French engineer who made several important contributions to hydraulics, including Darcy’s law for flow in porous media.

Xavier Huillard is a French business executive, and the chairman and CEO of Vinci SA. He has been CEO since 2006, and chairman since 2010.

Paul Andreu was a French architect, known for his designs of multiple airports such as Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and multiple prestigious projects in China, including the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Michel Virlogeux is a French structural engineer and bridge specialist.

Fulgence Bienvenüe was a French civil engineer, best known for his role in the construction of the Paris Métro, and has been called "Le Père du Métro" (Father of the Metro).

Antoine Compagnon is a Professor of French Literature at Collège de France, Paris (2006–), and the Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York City (1985–).

Eugène Freyssinet was a French structural and civil engineer. He was the major pioneer of prestressed concrete.

Abdelouafi Laftit is a Moroccan politician, currently serving as Minister of the Interior since 5 April 2017.

Claude-Louis Navier was a French civil engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics.

Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist. He is best known for his work on the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference, leading to the Coriolis effect. He was the first to apply the term travail (translated as "work") for the transfer of energy by a force acting through a distance,...

Jean-Baptiste Biot was a French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who co-discovered the Biot–Savart law of magnetostatics with Félix Savart, established the reality of meteorites, made an early balloon flight, and studied the polarization of light.

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a French experimental physicist who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Pierre Curie for his discovery of radioactivity.

Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy FRS FRSE was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist. He was one of the first to rigorously state and prove the key theorems of calculus (thereby creating real analysis), pioneered the field complex analysis, and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra. Cauchy also contributed to a number of topics in mathematical physics, notably continuum mechanics.

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume (with Alexander von Humboldt), for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many...

Marie François Sadi Carnot was a French statesman who served as President of France from 1887 until his assassination in 1894.

Jean Tirole is a French economist who is currently a professor of economics at Toulouse 1 Capitole University. He focuses on industrial organization and game theory. In particular, he focuses on the regulation of economic activity in a way that does not hinder innovation while maintaining fair rules. Tirole's work is largely theoretical and explored in mathematical models, not empirical...

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, fully supplanting Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s  until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped"...

Élisabeth Borne is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from May 2022 to January 2024, becoming the second woman to hold the position of Prime Minister and the first in 30 years. From December 2024 to October 2025, she served as the Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research in the Bayrou government and first...

Alain Aspect is a French physicist noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement.

Chakib Benmoussa is a Moroccan diplomat and politician, currently serving as the High Commissionaire of the High Commission on Planning (HCP). He previously served as the interior minister of Morocco and has been the lead negotiator for the Moroccan side in the Western Sahara conflict. Since December 2012, he is serving as the Moroccan ambassador to France. Between October 7,...

Gérard Araud is a retired French diplomat who served as Ambassador of France to the United States from 2014 to 2019. He previously served as Director General for Political and Security Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2006–2009) and France's permanent representative to the United Nations (2009–2014).

François Villeroy de Galhau is a French senior civil servant and banker who has served as Governor of the Bank of France and ex officio President of the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority since 2015. He announced his resignation for June 2026.

Henry Bertrand Marie Armand de Lesquen du Plessis-Casso is a French politician. A retired official and former radio director, De Lesquen has been the president of the Carrefour de l'Horloge, a national-liberal think tank, since 1985. A blogger and YouTuber since the 2010s, he has participated in popularising the concept of "remigration" in France.

Frédéric Oudéa is a French businessman who was CEO of Société Générale, and is president of the European Banking Federation.

Jacques José Mardoché Attali is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant.

Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity (petawatt) laser pulses.