Europe needs all of us to build its future.

According to mythology, the nymph Europa, lost in the turmoil of an unfinished love story, had little time to travel the continent to which she gave her name.
Time passed. Olympus, Parnassus and other residential areas became uninhabited. Perhaps because their occupants never existed. Almost certainly because we stopped believing in them. By contrast, Europe built its own history. It is constantly evolving and thus has a promising future. A future that was discussed by Philippe Herzog on the occasion of an inaugural lecture given at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts ParisTech.
The series of five inaugural lectures marked the first meeting between the school and its first year students, as well as the beginning of a new educational experience based not only on the imparting of knowledge but also on customer and user satisfaction. Key figures, personalities who not only pass on but also produce knowledge, are now coming to talk to the students. Although the world of knowledge is growing richer and developing, today we find ourselves faced with a world of certainty challenged by questions, by incertitude, by incompleteness, by complexities and by speculation. Right or wrong according to a single criterion is gradually being abandoned in favour of a better or worse compromise based on a weighted set of considerations.