Joseph Tilly

Joseph Tilly

Joseph-Marie De Tilly (born August 16, 1837 in Ypres , † August 4, 1906 in Munich ) was a Belgian mathematician and artillery officer.

Life

Tilly was an artillery officer and also taught geometry at his regimental school from 1858 onwards. He also began doing geometric research himself and made discoveries about non-Euclidean geometry around 1860 independently of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky , of whom he only heard in 1866. Otherwise he had no contact with academic research. In 1870 he published a work on non-Euclidean mechanics (Études de méchanique abstraite), an area he founded and through which he found the attention of mathematician Guillaume Jules Hoüel , with whom he corresponded from 1870 to 1885. This was followed by two essays on the axiomatic foundations of metric geometries (Riemannian, Lobachevskian and Euclidean).

Tilly was later director of the arsenal in Antwerp and director of the École Militaire. There he was forbidden to teach analysis because there had been complaints about the officers' training being too scientific. When he failed to do this, he was dismissed in December 1899 and forced into retirement in 1900. When he left he was lieutenant general.

He also wrote a history of the first hundred years of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences from 1772 to 1872.

In 1870 he became a corresponding and in 1878 a full member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and was its president in 1887.

literature

• J. Pelseneer, Dictionary of Scientific Biography
• P. Mansion, obituary in Annuaire de l'Académie royale de Belgique, Volume 80, 1914, pp. 203-285.

Fonts

• Recherches sur les éléments de géométrie, 1860
• Études de mécanique abstraite, 1870
• Essai sur les principes fondamentaux de la géométrie et de la méchanique, 1878
• Essai de géométrie analytique générale, 1892

Web links

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