[2][3] Following a two-decade long career as a secondary mathematics teacher, including an agrégation in Mathematics in 1992, Proust studied epistemology and history of science at Paris Diderot University, earning a diplôme d'études approfondies in 1999 and a doctorate in 2004,[3] supervised by Christian Houzel [fr].
[8] In her thesis work, Proust edited and analyzed two long-neglected collections of Old Babylonian mathematical tablets that constitute part of the vast trove of artifacts excavated at Nippur by John Punnett Peters, John Henry Haynes and Hermann Hilprecht in the late 1800s.
[11][12] The first is an edition of the tablets housed at the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul and an improved reconstruction of the curriculum for elementary scribal education in mathematics at Old Babylonian Nippur, the second is an edition of the tablets housed in the Hilprecht Collection at the University of Jena.
Proust's work produced the most detailed reconstruction of the process of elementary scribal education at Old Babylonian Nippur, including the curriculum and timelines, the interaction of education in Sumerian language and mathematics (Sumerian was a foreign language to the Akkadian speakers of the Old Babylonian era), and the interaction between metrological calculation and abstract calculation using sexagesimal place-value notation.
[9] She is the editor of books including: Proust was the 2011 winner of the Prix Paul Doistau-Émile Blutet de l'information scientifique [fr], given by the French Academy of Sciences in recognition of the body of her work and, in particular, for her publication of the Nippur tablets.