My father was an engineer who liked science and taught me a lot of classical geometry (circle and triangle) and my mother, who had stopped studying during the Second World War, was very fond of art. She was extremely enthusiastic about Impressionist painting and the subsequent development of Modern Art. She began studying history of art at École du Louvres when she was in her 50's.

When I was a child, around the age of ten, my father, who was already quite old, lost his job due to the economic crisis of the 1970s. At that time, he dedicated more time taking care of us, his children, and especially me, because I was good at math, unlike my brother who was just a year older than me and not interested in math. Ultimately, I benefited indirectly from his more marked presence in our life. ... He taught me traditional geometry, ellipse equations, and other math concepts. I learned a lot from him, even if it wasn't necessarily up to date.

I think it was precisely [in the preparatory classes] that I saw that mathematics could be deep. For example, I loved general topology - that you can define a function to be continuous simply set-theoretically, because it preserves a certain kind of subset that you defined before - found it wonderful ...

For two or three more years, I wondered about the possibility of doing philosophy, because I was looking for something beyond mathematical ideas, perhaps even what generated these ideas.

I explored more specialised areas, such as algebraic topology during my Master's degree. Later, in graduate school, I was introduced to magnificent theories, such as Riemannian geometry, the theory of geodesics, curvature, and the calculus of variations, notably thanks to Marcel Berger's course. These theories were characterised by very relevant and extremely well developed definitions, which made them captivating.

Although she has considerably mellowed over the years, she was very intense and demanding in her initial engagements in the world of mathematics. While preparing her PhD thesis, she was appointed teaching assistant for a course taught by Luc Illusie. The story goes that she quickly decided that the material given in class was not sufficiently challenging and she turned her exercise sessions into a parallel, much faster course, to the dismay of most of the students.

I would like to thank Arnaud Beauville, who proposed the theme of this work to me, and whose judicious advice helped me to bring it to fruition.

Claire has always been a very quick thinker, and when it came to mathematics she had little patience with details and people whose thinking was slower than hers. Her first article, published in 'Inventiones' in 1986 and extracted from her PhD thesis, where she proved the Torelli theorem for cubic hypersurfaces of dimension 4, contains the following warning: "The symbol $\Box$ means: the proof is obvious or uninteresting" (and these boxes are liberally used in that article). This capacity to think more quickly than others impressed all those around her.

In 1987, I met Kollár who at that time was Professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where I was supposed to stay as a postdoc with Herb Clemens but having left my baby in Paris, I found the separation too hard and after one month finally decided to return. Starting from that period, for many years I spent most of my time at home, except of course for attending seminars, and found it very convenient doing research there.

Whenever invited to speak at a conference with Claire Voisin in the audience, I am particularly nervous, and I like to think that I am not the only one. It is likely that at the end of a talk, especially on one of her numerous favourite topics, she understands the matter better than anyone else in the room, speaker included. She is likely to point out a crucial subtlety you have totally missed or may come up with a cleverer argument or a stronger result. At least, that is what happened to me. In any case, her questions are always dead-on target and likely to keep you thinking for some time. It seems almost impossible to discover a geometric construction involving Hodge theory that she has not thought of before or will not be able to enhance right away. Her technical prowess and her geometric intuition are mind-blowing and often, I find, a little intimidating.

... for her work in algebraic geometry, in particular on Torelli's theorem, on the Griffiths-Harris conjectures, on the Noether-Lefschetz locus and on algebraic cycles.

... for her deep contributions to algebraic geometry, and in particular for her recent solutions to two long-standing open problems: the Kodaira problem and Green's Conjecture.

... for her disproof of the Kodaira conjecture.

... for their remarkable results in many central areas of algebraic geometry, which have transformed the field and led to the solution of long-standing problems that had appeared out of reach.

... for her outstanding work in algebraic geometry. Her pioneering discoveries have allowed to resolve fundamental questions on the topology and Hodge structures of complex algebraic varieties.

... for work that has driven forward mathematical thought by breaking down barriers and bridging the space between two key areas of geometry.

... for outstanding contributions to complex and algebraic geometry, including Hodge theory, algebraic cycles, and hyperkähler geometry.

I had five children, I was very passionate about educating them, about spending time with them and I think that family life helped me a lot. This job can be hard psychologically, with a lot of uncertainties related to research, the work sometimes goes very slowly. For me having to spend a lot of time with my children, having family duties, made me better balanced and that was in some sense very helpful. You know, it's hard to convince yourself that you are doing something very useful, if you do pure mathematics. I don't ask myself a lot of these questions anymore but sometimes it is not clear if you are doing something very important. With a family, you don't have to ask yourself this question. I think I would have had much more psychological difficulty in my research if I had not had my family.

I worked on mirror symmetry maybe for three or four years. Then I left, because I didn't feel I was doing my best. I was trying to understand what these people had in mind, but I gave up quickly. The problem is, physicists have extraordinary ideas - sort of like magic. But they don't work at the same scale of time as us. We mathematicians need a lot of time to produce the right definitions and to prove theorems. And we are not happy if the statements are not proved rigorously. When you start doing that, and you come back three years later, and tell the physicists, "now I have proved your formula rigorously", they already went in another direction. Some mathematicians have stayed in contact with physics and have done extraordinary things. But for me it was not good, because I like to work alone and to ask my own questions.

Over the years, as she has gone from success to success, she has become a little less driven and more helpful when addressing others. She is now an excellent speaker. Her courses, although still relatively fast-paced, are very successful with students, and she has written a very popular reference book on Hodge theory based on these courses. She is very generous with her time (with students as well as with colleagues), and I believe that her students are no longer terrified of meeting with her. But her enthusiasm for mathematics is intact, and she is still remarkably intense.

Over the past quarter century, Claire Voisin has been the leader in the field of complex algebraic geometry. In her work she has both solved many deep, long-standing geometric problems and established a number of results that delineate the field. Of particular personal interest is the extraordinary depth and ingenuity of her use of Hodge theory blended with the panoply of modern algebro-geometric methods. Although Claire has complete mastery of Hodge theory and of the more formal algebraic and homological techniques in algebraic geometry, rather than add to these theories for their own sake her work enriches them by their use in solving difficult questions; she is a problem solver in the best sense of the word rather than a theory builder.

Despite being somewhat awe-inspiring, Voisin has become extremely popular among young algebraic geometers. She has supervised a number of excellent PhD theses and is known for her generosity towards her students and to young mathematicians in general. Her advanced courses on complex geometry and Hodge theory were crucial in the formation of a new generation of French complex geometers, and the English two-volume edition of her book on the subject has become the ultimate source for everyone wishing to learn about the modern theory of complex manifolds. Among my students, it has become an unspoken requirement and a good tradition to work through her book methodically. Voisin's deep love for algebraic geometry and her dedication to advance mathematics in general will continue to be an inspiration. The challenge is to keep up with her.