About

See also my CV for the short version. If you would like to get in touch, the contact page has the details.

My name is Florian Rascoussier, and I also go by Onyr, my pen name and pseudonym. I am a PhD student in Operations Research and Optimization, in joint supervision between two French grandes écoles, IMT Atlantique and INSA Lyon, and I spend most of my time in Lyon. My work is advised by Romain Billot, Christine Solnon and Lina Fahed, and it revolves around algorithms for vehicle routing and urban transportation.

If you have landed here, you probably want to know a little more about who I am, beyond a résumé. For a long time I have thought of myself along three axes: Science, Art, and Philosophy. They are not three separate boxes so much as three angles on the same wish, to understand the world a little better and to add something worthwhile to it if possible.

Art

Art is the prism through which the world reveals itself. I like the idea that almost anything becomes art once you lift the veil of the ordinary and really look. I write (poems and short stories, some of which live in the blog), I draw, and I have spent years building an imaginary universe of my own. Creating is, for me, the most natural way to pay attention to the world.

Science

Science is, to me, the framework that makes creation possible. It is a disciplined way of being curious, of turning wonder into understanding and understanding into things that did not exist before. I find a quiet kind of happiness in that: contributing, however modestly, to a world that works a little better. And I never quite get used to how strange and beautiful it is that any of this can be understood at all.

I recently had a very nice discussion on the difference between art and science with Guillaume Beslon. Guillaume told me that, for him, both art and science are a 3-step process: the first is about creation, the second about work and the last is about fame. In art, the accent is only on the first step: all the hard work is invisible (the hundred of failed attempts, the hours of practice, the years of study). Only the initial idea will take you to the last. In science, its the opposite: the initial creative process is invisible, only the hard work matters (the experiments, the proofs, the writing). Once you reach the last step (which indeed is far from guaranteed), then people will interest themselves to the whole process and was was invisible will become visible and appreciated. I found this a very interesting perspective. Ultimately, I am convinced that both art and science are about creation, and that the difference is in the way they are perceived by others, on top of the initial goals.

Philosophy

Philosophy is how I try to situate myself and orient what I do. I take it less as a set of answers than as a compass pointing, however imperfectly, toward wisdom. Two threads matter to me here. One is the body: mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body, which is why sport has always been part of my life. The other is ethics, which I understand as resting on three things: accepting yourself, respecting the freedom of others, and trying to act with a bit of wisdom. When I need perspective, I still return to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.

On the name Onyr

Onyr began as a pen name and slowly grew into a small personal universe. The circular, many-colored symbol you see around the site is Kromaryl, a piece of that world (from two invented words, kroma for color and ryl for circle). If a page ever greets you with “Bienvenue, voyageur”, welcome, traveler, that is the spirit of the place: a little corner of the web where science, art, and reflection are allowed to sit next to one another.