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Gravitational waves and black holes are two of the predictions generated by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. They appeared as early as 1916, shortly after the physicist's work was published. But it took more than fifty years of theoretical development to identify them and nearly a hundred years of effort to confirm the existence of gravitational waves experimentally. The recent discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and by the Virgo interferometer in Italy, was the first direct evidence of the existence of black holes. In this conference, Professor Thibault Damour will focus on this major scientific discovery and explain what allowed scientists to deduce that these waves are born from the interaction between two black holes.