Louis Auguste Antoine

Louis Auguste Antoine (born November 23, 1888 in Mirecourt , † February 8, 1971 in Rennes ) was a French mathematician.

Life

Antoine was born in a small town near Nancy and attended the high school in Nancy. After his father took over the management of a match factory in Saintines near Compiègne , he went to the college in Compiègne, where he showed a penchant for mathematics and rugby. He then attended one of the Paris preparatory schools for the entrance exams to the elite universities and studied from 1908 at the École normal supèrieure in Paris. There he made friends with his fellow student Gaston Julia . After graduating, he taught at the Lycée de Dijon in Saint-Cyr. In 1914 he was drafted as a reserve lieutenant. In 1914 he was wounded twice and became a captain in 1917 and a knight of the Legion of Honor in 1916 and received the Croix de Guerre. On April 16, 1917, he lost both eyes at the front of Chemin des Dames when he was shot while observing the enemy lines with a telescope. The wound also made him lose his sense of smell, as the bullet destroyed his nose.

At a suggestion by Henri Lebesgue , he turned to research in two- and three-dimensional topology. In Lebesgue's view, blindness was not an obstacle to this, since the eyes of the mind and the ability to concentrate could replace the sight there. In May 1918 he married his long-time fiancée, who was also a teacher.

Lebesgue, Marcel Brillouin and his friend Gaston Julia made Braille copies of mathematics textbooks that he could study. For this purpose, Antoine developed mathematical Braille symbols. In 1921 he received his doctorate from the University of Strasbourg (Sur l'homéomorphie de deux figures et de leurs voisinages). The Antoinean collar, later named after him, also appeared in the dissertation. Antoine originally wanted to prove an analogue of Schoenflies' theorem in three dimensions: Given an embedding of the 2-sphere in the three-dimensional space, then there is a homeomorphism of the three-dimensional space that converts the embedded 2-sphere into the standard 2-sphere . Antoine found a counterexample for this, Antoine's collar, at the same time the first example of a wild embedding (another counterexample is Alexander's horned sphere, where James Alexander built on Antoine's work).

In 1922 he became a lecturer and in 1925 professor in Rennes. In his lectures he used a blackboard on which he could find a position with pins. In 1957 he developed heart problems and retired. In 1961 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences .

As a blind man he learned to play the piano and the mandolin.

Fonts

• Calcul différentiel et calcul intégral: Calcul intégral 1948
• Calcul différentiel et calcul intégral: Calcul différentiel, 1949 (new edition of both volumes 1955)

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Louis Auguste Antoine. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .