Eugène Charles Catalan

Eugène Charles Catalan. Portrait by Emile Delperée , 1884

Eugène Charles Catalan (born May 30, 1814 in Bruges , † February 14, 1894 ) was a Belgian mathematician .

Life

Catalan was born in Belgium and trained at the École polytechnique in Paris , where he met Joseph Liouville . In 1834 he was expelled from the university and went to Châlons-sur-Marne , where he got a job after graduation. He returned to the École Polytechnique in 1838 with the help of Liouville to teach descriptive geometry. In 1865 he followed a call to the University of Liège . In 1881 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg .

Catalan worked on continued fractions , descriptive geometry , number theory, and combinatorics . He published the famous Catalan Conjecture in 1844, which was only proven in 2002 by Preda Mihăilescu . Its name bears a unique, periodic structure that it came across in 1855. He worked out the Catalan numbers to solve a combinatorial problem. The Catalan constant , the Catalan solids ( dual polyhedra to the Archimedean solids ) and the identity of Catalan for Fibonacci numbers are also named after him, as well as the Catalan surface . ${\ displaystyle \ mathbb {R} ^ {3}}$

François Jongmans: Une élection orageuse à l'Institut . In: Bulletin de la société royale des Sciences de Liège . 55ème année. No. 5-6 , 1986, pp. 581-603 .
François Jongmans: Eugène Catalan . Géomètre sans patrie - républicain sans république. Société belge des professeurs de mathématiques d'expression française, 1996.

Théorèmes et Problèmes Géométrie élémentaire, Brussels, 2nd edition 1852, 6th edition 1879
Elements de géométrie, 1843
Traité élémentaire de géométrie descriptive, 2 volumes 1850, 1852, 5th edition 1881
Nouveau manuel des aspirants au baccalauréat ès sciences, 1852 (12 editions of the book)
Solutions of the problem of mathematic et de physique donnés à la Sorbonne dans les compositions du baccalauréat ès sciences, 1855/56
Manuel des candidats à l'École Polytechnique, 2 volumes, 1857-58
Notions d'astronomie, 1860 (the book saw 6 editions)
Traité élémentaire des séries, 1860
Histoire d'un concours, 1865, 2nd edition 1867
Cours d'analysis de l'université de Liège, 1870, 2nd edition 1880

^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Eugène Charles Catalan. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed September 5, 2015 (Russian).