Disclaimer 2026

I defended my PhD thesis in 2004, using the state-of-the-art LaTeX workflow back in the day: LaTeX to DVI, DVI to PS, PS to PDF. A full compilation took more than five minutes. A few years later, I realized that I could no longer compile the original LaTeX source files to PDF, as too many packages were outdated. Also, my manuscript was only available in French, and I wanted to have an English version as well. So I decided to convert the original LaTeX source files to Typst, a modern typesetting system that is easier to maintain and supports multilingual documents out of the box.

The document you are reading is the result of this conversion, performed in 2026. The original LaTeX source may have contained specific formatting, macros, or packages that do not have direct equivalents in Typst. As a result, some elements of the original document may not be perfectly preserved.

I decided to keep the content of the original document as much as possible, while adapting the formatting to fit the capabilities of Typst. For example, obvious typos have been fixed, but URLs that no longer work have been left as is. This is not a new version of the thesis, but rather a faithful reproduction of the original document in a new typesetting system. The goal is to make the content of the thesis more accessible and maintainable, while preserving the original ideas and arguments as much as possible.