Jérôme Franel

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Jérôme Franel

Jérôme Franel (born November 29, 1859 in Travers NE (citizen of Provence VD ), † November 21, 1939 in Zurich ) was a Swiss mathematician .

Live and act

Jérôme Franel grew up in Travers and had twelve siblings. He studied mathematics and physics at the Ecole Industrielle in Lausanne and at the ETH Zurich , in Berlin (with Karl Weierstrass , Ernst Eduard Kummer , Leopold Kronecker ) and in Paris (with Charles Hermite ). In 1883 he received his degree in mathematics in Paris. He then taught for two years at the École Industrielle in Lausanne, before beginning to teach at the French mathematics chair at the ETH Zurich in 1886.

In 1897 he was one of the organizers of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. He also read the lecture by Henri Poincaré, who was prevented by illness . From 1905 to 1909 he was President of the ETH Zurich and organized a reorganization that made it independent of the University of Zurich. In particular, on his initiative, she received the right to award doctorates in 1908 (which was previously reserved for the University of Zurich). Franel taught at the ETH until 1929.

In 1905 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich and an honorary citizen of Zurich.

After George Pólya, he was considered a good teacher at the ETH and was popular. However, after Pólya he was mainly interested in French literature and hardly in mathematical research. For decades he held introductory lectures in French analysis at the ETH. It was only when he approached retirement that he began to deal intensively with the Fermat conjecture and the Riemann conjecture . Today he is best known for his proof of the equivalence of the Riemann conjecture with a theorem about Farey series . This stimulated Edmund Landau (also in 1924) to do a series of works and was later the subject of research. ( Charles Pisot rediscovered the equivalence found by Landau in 1924 to an elementary theorem about Farey series in 1960). George Pólya reports that Franel had presented to him and the mathematician Louis Kollros, who was a friend of Franel, about his strategy to prove the Riemann Hypothesis. When Pólya wanted to have a passage explained in more detail, he said after a few minutes of silence: Yes, there is the mistake .

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Albert Einstein received z. B. formally his doctorate at the University of Zurich in 1905, although he had studied at the ETH. The first doctorates at the ETH were awarded in 1909.
  2. ↑ Pólya: He was an especially attractive kind of person and a very good teacher
  3. ↑ Pólya, quoted in Gerald Alexanderson The random walks of George Pólya , MAA 2000, p. 42
  4. ^ Franel Les suites de Farey et le théorème des nombres premiers , Gött. News 1924, 198-201
  5. ^ Scott B. Guthery, A Motif of Mathematics. History and application of the mediant and the Farey sequence , Docent Press 2011, p. 175
  6. ↑ Pisot Suites de Farey , Seminaire Delange-Pisot-Poitou 1960/61 ( Memento of the original from March 23, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.numdam.org
personal data
SURNAME Franel, Jérôme
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Franel, Jérome; Franel, Jerome
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Travers NE
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 1939
Place of death Zurich