Georges Henri Halphen

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Georges Henri Halphen

Georges Henri Halphen (born October 30, 1844 in Rouen , † May 23, 1889 in Versailles ) was a French mathematician who mainly worked in algebraic geometry and analysis , especially the algebraic theory of ordinary differential equations .

Life

After the death of his father, a cloth merchant, Halphen left his hometown Rouen with his mother at the age of four for Paris , where he attended the Lycée Saint-Louis until he graduated in 1862. He chose a military career and first attended the École polytechnique in Paris from 1862 to 1866 , which he left with the rank of sub-lieutenant of the artillery. Then he attended the military school in Metz (→ Metz Fortress ). His first mathematical work appeared in 1869. In the same year he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1870 he took part in the Franco-Prussian War as a captain and was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor after the Battle of Pont-Noyelles . He was also involved in the battles in Saint-Quentin and Bapaume . In 1871 he took part in the defense of besieged Paris and took part in the fighting against the Paris Commune .

In 1873 he became a repetitor at the École polytechnique and in the same year attracted attention in the mathematical world by solving a problem of the counting geometry of conics that Michel Chasles had posed, where he got into a controversy with Hermann Schubert . In 1878 he received his doctorate with a thesis Sur les invariants differentiels (which means under certain projective transformations invariant differential equation systems, beginnings of projective differential geometry). The dissertation arose from work on the classification of the singularities of closed algebraic curves , which the work of Max Noether expanded. He also competed with Max Noether in the classification of algebraic space curves (Journal de l'École Polytechnique, Vol. 57). For this work, both received the Steiner Prize of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1880 . Further fields of work were algebraic systems of ordinary differential equations (e.g. systems of the Halphen type) and elliptic functions .

At the same time Halphen continued his military career. In 1884 he became the commandant of a squadron, and in 1886 the command of the batteries of the 11th Regiment in Versailles - he had asked for a position near Paris in order to be able to attend the meetings of the Academy.

In 1882 he received the Steiner Prize from the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 1881 he received the Grand Prize of the French Academy of Sciences (for his work on linear differential equations, Mémoire sur la Reduction des Equations Différentielles Linéaires aux Formes Intégrales ) and in 1883 the Prix Poncelet of the Academy. In 1885 he received the Prix d'Ormoy. In 1886 he was elected to the Paris Academy. In 1885 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Liège, in 1887 of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, and in 1889 a member of the Danish Academy. While his work was highly valued during his lifetime and earned him many prizes, he has been somewhat forgotten today, as the mathematical fields he cultivated have become somewhat out of fashion.

He had been married to Rose Marguerite Aron since 1872, with whom he had eight children, four boys and four girls. Three of the sons went into the military, two of them died in the First World War. His grandson Etienne Halphen (1911–1954) did important work in applied statistics.

In 1882 he was president of the Société Mathématique de France .

Fonts

  • Works, edited in four volumes by Camille Jordan , Henri Poincaré , Charles Émile Picard with the assistance of Ernest Vessiot , 1916, 1918, 1921, 1924, Gauthier-Villars
  • Traité des fonctions elliptiques et de leurs applications , 3 vols., 1886, 1888, 1891 (in vol. 2 applications in physics, geometry, theory of integrals, geodesy, in vol. 3 application in algebra, in particular equation 5th degree, number theory )

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Halphen, Georges Henri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH Rouen
DATE OF DEATH May 23, 1889
Place of death Versailles