Léon Motchane
Léon Joseph Motchane (born Lew Edmundowitsch Motschan; born June 19, 1900 in Saint Petersburg , † January 17, 1990 in Paris ) was a French mathematician and manager. He is the founder of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES).
Motchane was the son of half Swiss, half Russian parents. He studied in Saint Petersburg, left Russia in 1918 and followed his mother and brother to Switzerland (his father followed a year later), where he studied in Lausanne until 1921. He was an assistant in the physics faculty there for a year. He had to work to support his family and went to Berlin in 1921 as an agent for an artist and later as an employee of an insurance company. From 1924 he settled in France, where he became prosperous as a manager. He acquired French citizenship in the 1930s.
During the occupation of France in World War II, he was involved in the underground publishing house Éditions de Minuite. In the publishing house he also published under the pseudonym Thimerais (La pensée patiente, 1943, Élements de doctrine, 1944). He was also in the Resistance and was also wounded, for which he received the Croix de guerre and the Resistance Medal with rosette.
Always interested in mathematics (he had studied mathematics in his youth, but could not graduate), he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1954 at an advanced age under Gustave Choquet . He published mathematical works as early as the 1930s and became a member of the Société Mathématique de France in 1933. After the war he published some work in the journal of the Academy of Sciences (Compte Rendu Acad. Sci.) On theoretical physics and mathematics. He was well known in Paris with eminent scholars such as Francis Perrin and Paul Montel .
Inspired by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, which he attended in 1958, he decided to set up a similar institute for Europe in France, the IHES. He had the support of IAS director Robert Oppenheimer and secured funding through his contacts in industry (e.g. Jacques Ballet, Pierre Dreyfus, André Grandpierre, Maurice Ponte, Arnaud de Vogue). It was the first major undertaking in Paris to found an independent institute since the Pasteur Institute . From 1962 the IHES was located in Bures-sur-Yvette near Paris. Motchane was its first director from 1958 to 1971. In the early years, Jean Dieudonné and Alexander Grothendieck , among others , who revolutionized algebraic geometry there with a group of students in the 1960s. In 1966 he accepted Grothendieck's Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, which Grothendieck boycotted for political reasons.
His successor as IHES director was Nicolaas Kuiper in 1971 . Motchane initially retired to Aix-en-Provence before returning to Paris. He devoted himself to mathematical work, but remained Vice President of the IHES and became its Honorary President in 1978.
Motchane was married to IHES secretary Annie Rolland for the second time. He is the father of the politician Didier Motchane (* 1931) and the physics professor at the University of Paris VII Jean-Loup Motchane.
He was a good piano and chess player.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Debus Whos Who in Science , 1968
- ^ Obituary by Louis Michel, Gazette des Mathematiciens, Volume 44, April 1990, pdf
- ↑ For example Sur la caractérisation des espaces de Baire , Compte Rendu Acad. Sci. 246, 1958, 215-218, Sur un nouveau critère de conservation de classe de Baire CR Acad. Sci., 242, 1956, 605-608, Sur la notion d'espace bitopologique et sur les espaces de Baire , CR Acad. Sci. 244, 1957, 3121-3124
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Motchane, Léon |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Motschan, Lew Edmundowitsch (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French mathematician and manager |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1900 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Petersburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | 17th January 1990 |
| Place of death | Paris |