Edmond Bour

Edmond Bour (born May 19, 1832 in Gray (Haute-Saône) , † March 9, 1866 in Paris ) was a French mathematician.

Bour attended school in Dijon and studied from 1850 at the École polytechnique , which he graduated in 1852 as the best of his class. He then continued his studies at the École des Mines , attended the lectures of Joseph Bertrand at the Collège de France , dealt largely with mathematical and celestial mechanical work and published his dissertation in 1855 (on the three-body problem and perturbation theory). He also presented the Academy with a treatise on the differential equations of mechanics (1855). After his graduation as a mining engineer (1855) he became professor of mechanics at the Ècole des Mines in Saint-Étienne , but after only one year he became professor at the Ècole des Mines in Paris and in 1859 he became a tutor for descriptive geometry and in 1861 professor for Kinematics at the École polytechnique.

In 1859 he took part in a competition of the Académie des Sciences on a subject of differential geometry, in which Delfino Codazzi and Pierre Ossian Bonnet also participated and which he won (1861). When he was elected to the Academie des Sciences to succeed Jean-Baptiste Biot , however, he was beaten by Bonnet in 1862, which deeply disappointed him. Bonnet had also published excellent, internationally recognized work in differential geometry and was also the senior. Bonnet then turned to mechanics, published on kinematics, statics and dynamics of machines and hydraulics. Before his death, he prepared his mechanics lectures at the Ecole Polytechnique for publication and the volume on kinematics was published while the volume was alive. In 1860 he traveled to Algeria to observe a solar eclipse in 1860.

His early death from an illness cut off a promising scientific career. He has always been ailing, and in addition he contracted an infectious disease during an arduous journey to Asia Minor in 1863 to explore ore deposits, from which he eventually died. He took this trip for financial reasons to support his family, especially his sister. His health deteriorated from intensive work on his lectures in mechanics. He died in the Vale de Grace Hospital, where the director took care of him himself, and is buried in his hometown. He received a solemn funeral and his fellow students at the Ecole Polytechnique granted his last wish to look after his family.

In 1865 he became a member of the Academy of Besançon.

In connection with the differential geometry of surfaces of constant negative curvature, he was the first to introduce the Sinus-Gordon equation in 1862 , which resulted from the Codazzi-Mainardi equations (later of importance in the theory of solitons ).

literature

• René Taton , entry in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• Notice biographique sur Edmond Bour, Nouvelles annales de mathématiques, Volume 6, 1867, pp. 145–157.
• A. de Lapparent, in: École Polytechnique, Livre de Centenaire, Paris 1895, volume 1

Fonts

• Sur l'intégration des equations différentielles de la mécanique analytique, Journal de mathématiques pures et appliquées, Volume 20, 1855, pp. 185-202
• Théorie de la déformation des surfaces, Journal de l'École polytechnique, Volume 22, 1862
• Cours de mathématiques et machines, 3 volumes, Paris 1865–1874 (Cinematique 1865, La statique et le travail des forces dans les machines à l'état de mouvement uniforme, 1868, La dynamique et l'hydraulique 1874)
• Lettres Choisis, editors Joseph Bertin, Charles Godard, 1905

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Edmond Bour. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography at the Ecole Polytechnique, French