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The École nationale supérieure des Mines de Paris (also known as École des Mines de Paris, ENSMP, les Mines, Mines Paris) is one of the French generalist and most prominent engineering Grandes Ecoles.
Despite its small size (120 students in a year), it is very famous in French industry.
Created in 1783 on the request of King Louis XVI in order to train "intelligent directors of mines" the École des Mines has settled in the Hôtel de Vendôme (all along the Jardin du Luxembourg in the 6th arrondissement of Paris). It also has annexes in Fontainebleau, Évry and Sophia-Antipolis (Nice).
Its former vocation to train mining engineers evolved in the course of time, because of technological progress and transformations of society. ENSMP has become nowadays a "generalist" school, with a broad variety of disciplines. Its students are for the most part supposed to have management position in industrial companies and receive a good training not only in technical fields but also in economics and social sciences. (e.g. a sociology course by Bruno Latour)
It is an application school of École Polytechnique, and provides education for the Corps of Mines.
Two of its alumni have got a Nobel Prize :
- Maurice Allais, Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
- Georges Charpak, Nobel Prize in physics
Other écoles des Mines include:
- École nationale supérieure des Mines de Nancy;
- École nationale supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne.