Jean-Alex Michard passed away on Thursday, May 15, 2018. All those who were close to him in the steel industry and in industrial research can testify of his empathy towards people in general and each one of them in particular. This is why the present obituary tells a series of stories, where the signatories recollect how challenging and intellectually pleasing it was to interact with him, not as a boss but as a co-worker, a co-discoverer! As if they were alone in a bubble with him! His

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... nal life started at the Saulnes research station, where he was hired in 1952 by Lucien Coche, in IRSID's Minerais-Coke-Fonte (ironmaking) department. In a "joyful team", as he himself called it, he was in charge of the studies on ores and he launched foresight studies on the future of the Lorraine iron ore field [1-3]. His enthusiasm for research and industrial life strongly directed at the future, as well as his desire to convince, appeared from the very beginning of his professional life. Pioneer in the field of ironmaking Jean-Alex Michard will remain first of all a pioneer in the field of the blast furnace, as the engineer-scientist who, along with André Rist, brought about the first physicochemical model of how this reactor functions, a major contribution to the world scientific community; his approach, published at the end of the 1950s, was based on the results of vertical probes. Following the contributions of Kitaev and Reichardt, the predictive model of the operating point of the blast furnace that he developed was a fundamental breakthrough compared to the statistical descriptions of the time. It opened the door to the automation of the blast furnace [4] [5] [6] . He thus contributed to the creation of a French blast furnace school of international fame [7] . J.A. Michard was a man of strong opinions. For example, he was a powerful advocate of the development of the sintering of iron ores, which he considered as an absolute prerequisite for the smooth operation of the blast furnace and the further reduction of coke consumption. Indeed coke consumption dropped regularly from the 1960s to the 1980s [8] [9] [10] . In his mind, sintering was an integral part of the image he had built of the blast furnace. *