Henri Padé

Henri Eugène Padé

Henri Eugène Padé (born December 17, 1863 in Abbeville , † July 9, 1953 in Aix-en-Provence ) was a French mathematician, known for the Padé approximation .

Padé went to school in Abbeville and from 1881 at the Lycée St. Louis in Paris. From 1883 he studied at the École normal supérieure , where he passed his teaching exams in 1886. In addition to his teaching profession, he also published mathematical works and in 1889/90 went to Felix Klein (whose Erlangen program he translated into French in 1891) and Hermann Amandus Schwarz in Leipzig and Göttingen . In 1892 he received his doctorate from Charles Hermite at the Sorbonne ( Sur la représentation approchée d'une fonction par des fractions rationelles ). He examined the approximation functions for rational functions (fractions from polynomials), known today as Padé approximations . However, these were already known to mathematicians of the 18th century such as Daniel Bernoulli , Joseph-Louis Lagrange or Leonhard Euler and later, for example, Carl Gustav Jacobi , Hermite himself and in particular Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (dissertation 1870). Padé developed the theory systematically in the following years and showed its applicability. After his doctorate he was a teacher in Lille from 1893 and from 1897 Maître de conférences at the University of Lille there as the successor to Émile Borel . In 1902 he became professor of mechanics in Poitiers and in 1903 in Bordeaux . In 1906 he received the French Academy Grand Prize for work on his approximations. In 1908 he was rector of the Academy in Besançon , in 1917 in Dijon and in 1923 until his retirement in 1934 rector of the University of Aix-Marseille .

Web links

Commons : Henri Padé  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Henri Padé. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Padé approximation at Mathworld