François Cosserat

François Nicolas Cosserat (born October 26, 1852 in Douai , † March 22, 1914 in France ) was a French civil engineer.

Cosserat was the older brother of Eugène Cosserat and had another brother, Lucien Constant Cosserat (1856-1897), a railway engineer who, like François Cosserat , had studied at the École polytechnique . Cosserat studied at the École polytechnique from 1870 to 1872 and then continued his training as a civil engineer at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées , graduating in 1875. He then worked as a railway engineer on railway lines, bridges and tunnels. First he worked in northern France, then in eastern France. In 1895 he became chief engineer, 2nd class.

In addition to his practical work as an engineer, he worked with his brother Eugène, a mathematician and astronomer at the University of Toulouse, on elasticity theory . Here the Cosserat continuum is named after both. In 1913 he was President of the French Mathematical Society, became a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1893 and a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1896 .

He also translated from English, German and Russian. At the time of his death, he was translating the principles of statistical mechanics from Josiah Willard Gibbs into French. Like his brother, he worked for the French edition of the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences , for which he translated and edited articles from German.

Fonts

• with E. Cosserat: Théorie de l'élasticité 1896
• with E. Cosserat: Théorie des corps déformables, Paris: Hermann 1909

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  François Cosserat. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .