Last weekend highlighted the difference in their respective worlds.

At about the same time on Saturday, Jessica, 31, competed in the Grand Prix at the Longines Paris Eiffel Jumping event, to the stunning backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, while 'The Boss' was making a surprise appearance at the Glastonbury Festival supporting fellow legend Paul McCartney.

She had a busy weekend competing in at least six competitions on her two horses RMF Zecilie and Hungry Heart, the latter a name that will resonate with her father's fans.

Springsteen, though, has been very much the author of her successful career in showjumping -- a rare sport where men and women compete on an equal basis -- reaching the zenith thusfar with the silver in the team competition at the Olympics last year in Tokyo.

That came at the third time of asking as in 2012 in London she was an alternate rider for the team and then missed out on the 2016 Games.

However, having battled her way to the top she knows that it is a sport which has many pitfalls.

"The sport is always challenging, there are always ups and downs and you really have to stick with it," she told AFP.

"There have been many moments where I felt like my aspirations of making a championship team were so far away and that I would never get there.

"It's so important to trust the process and stay determined and be patient.

"It is definitely not easy, but there's no better feeling than when it all comes together."

She certainly had a rude introduction to riding aged six as her first pony tried to gain the upper hand.

"Yes, my first pony Shamrock would always spin and buck and was quite cheeky," she said.

"I think I learned a lot from every horse I have ridden. My first pony definitely taught me resilience!"

'Strong mindset'

Springsteen admits it took a while for her to gain the confidence required for the stiff challenge of guiding a powerful horse round an arena packed with obstacles to jump.

"I was quite nervous when I was younger, and it took me a lot of time to become comfortable even jumping," she said.

"Since I started so young, I really took my time at every level and waited to start jumping bigger fences until I felt really confident, which I think was important for me.

"Every time I moved up to new divisions, I was really excited and eager."

At 31 Springsteen would be in many sports entering the final stages of her career but as Nick Skelton showed when winning Olympic individual gold aged 58 showjumping is ageless.

Springsteen, though, says a big reason for the longevity of so many riders in the sport is down to their love of horses and adapting to their different demands.

"It's not about how physically strong you are, it’s about being sensitive to your horse and figuring out what makes them jump their best.

"Being able to work with them every day is truly a dream for me.

"And I feel really grateful that I compete in a sport that you can do for many many years, that's really rare."

This battle between horse and rider in establishing relationships has been helped in Springsteen's case by her having studied psychology.

"I've continued to read sports psychology books as well which I find really helpful," she said.

"I think having a strong mindset is so important.

"If I wasn’t riding, yes perhaps I would have continued studying psychology and doing something in that field!"

© 2022 AFP

The American has slumped to 1,204th in the world rankings but remains Wimbledon royalty, with seven singles titles under her belt.

AFP Sport looks at five of her most memorable moments at the All England Club.

First Grand Slam title

For all her success on the singles court, Williams won her first Grand Slam title alongside Max Mirnyi in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1998.

Williams and the Belarusian player beat Mahesh Bhupathi and Mirjana Lucic in straight sets in the final, going on to win the US Open later that year.

It was the first of 39 Grand Slam titles to date for the American in singles, doubles and mixed doubles.

Sister act

Serena Williams has won 14 women's Grand Slam doubles titles with her older sister Venus, but they have faced each other across the net in nine major finals.

Serena's first Wimbledon singles title came in 2002 when she beat Venus 7-6 (7/4), 6-3, in a much-anticipated clash.

Serena did not drop a set during the entire tournament and became world number one for the first time following her victory.

She beat Venus again in the final the following year but her older sister got her revenge in 2008, triumphing 7-5, 6-4 in the title match.

The following year Serena again came out on top in their sisterly rivalry, winning 7-6 (7/3), 6-2.

Two-year drought

Serena Williams suffered a foot injury after winning her fourth Wimbledon singles title in 2010 and it was to be two years before she added to her collection of major titles.

But she beat Poland's Agnieszka Radwanska 6–1, 5–7, 6–2 in the Wimbledon final in 2012.

That triumph led to a new period of dominance for the American, who won three of the following five Grand Slams.

Steffi Graf record

Williams won her seventh and most recent Wimbledon singles title in 2016, beating Angelique Kerber in the final.

It was payback for her defeat to the German in the Australian Open final earlier that year and took her level with Steffi Graf's record of 22 Grand Slam titles in the Open era.

Williams overtook Graf by winning the 2017 Australian Open but remains one behind all-time leader Margaret Court, who won 24 Grand Slam singles titles.

Wimbledon pain

Williams, who missed Wimbledon in 2017 when pregnant, was a defeated finalist at the All England Club in 2018 and 2019 while the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 tournament.

Last year ended in bitter disappointment as she had to retire in the first set of her match against Aliaksandra Sasnovich due to a leg injury.

Wimbledon is widely considered Williams's chance of equalling Court's all-time record as she chases the elusive number 24.

© 2022 AFP

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful ever sent into orbit, is set Tuesday to unveil breathtaking new views of the Universe with a clarity that's never been seen before.

Distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a faraway giant gas planet are among the observatory's first targets, US space agency NASA said Friday.

But the images themselves have been jealously guarded to build suspense ahead of the big reveal.

"I'm looking very much forward to not having to keep these secrets anymore, that will be a great relief," Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) that oversees Webb, told AFP.

NASA chief Bill Nelson has promised the "deepest image of our Universe that has ever been taken."

Webb's infrared capabilities are what make it uniquely powerful -- allowing it to both pierce through cosmic dust clouds and detect light from the earliest stars, which has been stretched into infrared wavelengths as the Universe expanded.

This lets it peer further back in time than any previous telescope, to the period shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

"When I first saw the images... I suddenly learned three things about the Universe that I didn't know before," Dan Coe, an STSI astronomer and expert on the early Universe, told AFP. "It's totally blown my mind."

First targets

An international committee decided the first wave of images would include the Carina Nebula, an enormous cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light years away.

Webb has also carried out a spectroscopy -- an analysis of light that reveals detailed information -- on a faraway gas giant called WASP-96 b, which was discovered in 2014.

Nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, WASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and zips around its star in just 3.4 days.

Nestor Espinoza, an STSI astronomer, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies carried out using existing instruments were very limited compared to what Webb could do.

"It's like being in a room that is very dark and you only have a little pinhole you can look through," he said of the prior technology. Now, with Webb, "You've opened a huge window, you can see all the little details."

Perhaps most enticing of all, Webb has gathered an image using foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant and faint objects behind it.

Million miles from Earth

Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, Webb is orbiting the Sun at a distance of a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, in a region of space called the second Lagrange point.

A wonder of engineering, the total project cost is estimated at $10 billion, making it one of the most expensive scientific platforms ever built, comparable to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Webb's primary mirror is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) wide and is made up of 18 gold-coated mirror segments. Like a camera held in one's hand, the structure must remain as stable as possible to achieve the best shots.

Charlie Atkinson, chief engineer on the James Webb Space Telescope program at lead contractor Northrop Grumman, told AFP that it wobbles no more than 17 millionths of a millimeter.

Atkinson, who has been working on the program since 1998, said: "We knew it was going to require some of the best talents across the world, but it was doable."

After the first images, astronomers around the globe will get shares of time on the telescope, with projects selected competitively through a process in which applicants and selectors don't know each others' identity, to minimize bias.

Thanks to an efficient launch, NASA estimates Webb has enough propellant for a 20-year life, as it works in concert with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to answer fundamental questions about the cosmos.

© 2022 AFP

But for Duminil-Copin, who specialises in probability theory, those quiet moments can lead to discoveries that won him the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for mathematics.

He accepted the prize, which is awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40, at a ceremony in Finland's capital Helsinki.

The other winners were Britain's James Maynard of Oxford University, June Huh of Princeton in the United States and Ukraine's Maryna Viazovska, who is only the second ever woman laureate.

Duminil-Copin described with unabashed enthusiasm the happiness he finds in working with others in the search for answers -- whether or not they find one.

"It's the best, especially since it's a collective process, where all the beauty is in interacting with others," he said in an interview a few days before the prize was announced.

A visual mind

Born on August 26, 1985, Duminil-Copin has collected a raft of mathematics awards over the last decade.

At the age of 31, he was appointed professor at France's Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies in 2016.

"It's a place that seems made for me, for my creative part," he said of the green campus outside Paris.

It gives the mathematician that most precious resource for deep thinkers: time.

"This slowness in everyday life is very fruitful because I need time for ideas to come, for them to settle quietly, for them to take shape," he said.

At the campus, which is not far from where he grew up, Duminil-Copin uses his "very visual intuition" to take on the most complicated mathematical problems.

"There are very few formulas and many drawings" in his mind when he thinks about such problems, he said.

That "aesthetic vision" allows him to view mathematics with a "certain elegance", he added.

The Paris institute allows researchers to free themselves of all other obligations, including teaching.

But Duminil-Copin teaches anyway, retaining a professorship at the University of Geneva, saying that "in the end it is perhaps the most important aspect of this profession".

He may have inherited this passion from his father, a sports teacher, and mother, a dancer who became a teacher later in life.

When he was younger, Duminil-Copin envisioned becoming a teacher himself -- of maths, of course -- but his talent propelled him towards research.

Collaboration is at the heart of his outlook. If he provides mathematical tools to physicists, their work in turn may allow someone else in the future to find new applications for them.

"It's the whole community that really produces scientific progress," he said.

Mental balance

Duminil-Copin hailed the importance of two university professors to his career, Jean-Francois Le Gall, who also worked on probability theory, and fellow Fields Medal winner Wendelin Werner.

He said he fell in "love at first sight" with percolation theory during a class Werner taught on the subject, which falls under the branch of statistical physics.

It was in that class that Duminil-Copin first encountered Nienhuis's conjecture -- a "beautiful, elegant and completely mysterious" problem, he said.

"I solved it a few years later, almost without doing it on purpose."

As a child, Duminil-Copin preferred astronomy to mathematics.

He said he was "not pushed at all" by his parents to focus solely on his studies -- instead they were keen to "confront him with a variety of things" such as sport, music and friends.

The lesson seems to have stuck.

"When we talk about preparing to become a researcher we think of intelligence, academic training, but there is also a mental balance which is very important," he said.

New ideas can strike him "anytime, in the middle of the night or in the shower", he said.

But they will have to wait until he's back at work.

"My priority is on the personal side, to spend time with my daughter and my wife."

© 2022 AFP

Slimane -- who became hugely influential as the stylist behind bands such as The Libertines and Daft Punk in the 2000s -- has not presented a live show in Paris since February 2020. He had dismissed them as "obsolete", preferring to present collections with videos shot in luxurious French locales.

'A boom'

The past few seasons have often seen men's and women's shows merging into one -- with London Fashion Week doing away with the distinction altogether.

But this week in Paris seemed to reaffirm the divide, with houses wanting to boost their focus on menswear at a time when demand is booming.

US designer Matthew Williams presented his first-ever standalone menswear show for Givenchy this week.

"It's good to give space to men and women, to each and everyone their platform to tell a story," Williams told fashion site WWD. "There's more room for more looks."

"Commercially, menswear is a market that has developed a lot with a particularly strong dynamic in Asia that has created a boom for pret-a-porter men's designers," said Serge Carreira, fashion expert at Sciences Po University.

'More accessible'

Also marking her first menswear show was France's Marine Serre, one of the biggest names to emerge in recent years.

The 30-year-old has made sustainability and inclusivity central to her brand, and that was evident at her sports-themed show in a stadium outside Paris on Saturday.

The models came in all shapes and sizes, from children to older people, alongside celebrities such as ex-footballer Djibril Cisse and Paralympic gold medallist Alexis Hanquinquant, as well as Madonna's daughter Lourdes Leon in one of the house's trademark moon-patterned bodysuits.

"Thirty percent of our sales have been for menswear in the last collections -- we're not at 50/50 but we do quite a bit of men's and we have no intention of doing less," Serre told AFP after the show.

"These are shapes that are less complex: it's easier and we can have better prices that mean it is more accessible for everyone to wear upcycled pieces."

Meanwhile, familiar names also made a mark this week.

Dior took inspiration from the childhood Normandy home of the label's founder, with a flower-filled garden runway and some straw hats and chic outdoor loungewear among the outfits.

Hermes was also in a relaxed, pastel-infused mood, which designer Veronique Nichanian told AFP was inspired by "lightness, comfort, fun and colours that pop."

© 2022 AFP

Staged by Rachid Ouramdane, director of the Chaillot National Theatre, the show brought together models, performers and acrobats who not only strutted but danced, leapt and climbed the walls.

The outfits were suitably loose and easy to move in, with fresh and vibrant reds, yellows and greens that matched the mood of rebirth.

The brand had presented all its collections via online videos or installations around Paris over the past two years, and was among the last to return to live shows.

"Now that it's easier to travel the world, we think it's the perfect moment to return with a full catwalk show," a spokesperson told AFP.

Meanwhile, under a blazing sun in the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, US designer Rick Owens put on a typically arresting display.

He described it as a metaphor for a world "disturbed by war and constant online stone throwing" in the show notes

As for the clothes, there were the trademark exaggerated shoulders and grungey glamour, but with some lighter touches in the form of transparent and billowing fabrics.

Some of the pieces used new sustainable materials that have become popular with designers as they try to counter the industry's atrocious environmental record.

"(It’s) a skin I use over and over," he said in the notes. "Fished as a food source by indigenous communities in the Amazon forest, the skins are then sold as a waste product generating income for them."

© 2022 AFP