Jules Drach

Jules Joseph Drach (born March 13, 1871 in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines near Colmar , † March 8, 1949 in Cavalaire-sur-Mer , Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur ) was a French mathematician.

Life

Drach came from an Alsatian farming family. Because of the Franco-Prussian War , the parents fled with the children to Saint-Dié . He attended school there and in Nancy and studied at the École Normale Superieure (ENS). In 1892 he received his Agrégation and in 1898 he received his doctorate from the ENS under Paul Tannery ( Essai sur la théorie générale de l'intégration et sur la classification des transcendantes ). In his dissertation he developed a Galois theory for differential equations, based on the work of Émile Picard , Sophus Lie and Ernest Vessiot . He was then Maître de Conférences at the University (Faculté des Sciences) in Clermont-Ferrand , was then in Lille and Professor in Poitiers and Toulouse , before he became Professor of Analytical Mechanics and Higher Analysis at the Sorbonne in 1913 . During the First World War he dealt theoretically with ballistics and published his research on it in 1920.

In retirement he moved to Cavalaire in the south of France, where he had a country estate to which he had often withdrawn because of his poor health. He remained mathematically active even in retirement.

In addition to analysis and its applications in mechanics, he later also dealt with number theory, partial differential equations and differential geometry.

In 1929 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences . In 1920 he was president of the Société Mathématique de France .

In 1892 he and his friend Émile Borel published lectures by Henri Poincaré and Paul Tannery that they had attended. He was also involved in the publication of Poincaré's works.

Drach was married to Mathilde Guitton. His son Pierre Drach was a well-known biologist.

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Jules Drach. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Literature by and about Jules Drach in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)