Lucien Godeaux

Lucien Auguste Godeaux (born October 11, 1887 in Morlanwelz , † April 21, 1975 in Liège ) was a Belgian mathematician.

Godeaux attended the Athenaeum in Ath and studied for a year at the Mining Academy (Ecole des Mines) in Mons before he studied mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Liège with his doctorate in 1911. He then attended the University of Bologna with a scholarship (with Federigo Enriques ) , Göttingen and Paris (with Émile Picard ). In 1914 he was back in Belgium and, after completing his voluntary military service, taught artillery at the Royal Military Academy. In 1920 he became associate professor and in 1925 professor at the University of Liège. In 1958 he retired.

He was particularly concerned with algebraic geometry and was influenced by the Italian school (Federigo Enriques and others). In particular, he developed the theory of involutions on algebraic surfaces, and special algebraic surfaces are named after him. He has produced over 1200 publications and several textbooks. Another area of ​​work was projective differential geometry. He also dealt with the history of mathematics in Belgium.

In 1921 he founded the Belgian Mathematical Society with Théophile de Donder and Alfred Errera . From its founding in 1948 to 1966, he was chairman of the Center Belge de Recherches mathématiques / Belgisch Centrum voor Wiskundig Onderzoek (Belgian Center for Mathematical Research). He was chairman of the Belgian National Committee for Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Sciences of Liege. He was also a member of the Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian and Polish mathematical societies and a member of the Padua, Bucharest, Lima, Milan and Bordeaux academies.

In 1940 he received the Poncelet Prize from the Institut de France and in 1950 the Tienjaarlijkse prijs voor wiskunde. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Bordeaux, Brussels, Clermont-Ferrand, Lille, Aix-Marseille, Dijon and Bologna.

Fonts

• Les transformations birationnelles du plan , 1927
• La Géométrie , 1931
• Leçons de géométrie projective , Paris: Hermann 1933
• Questions non résolues de géométrie algébrique: les involutions de l'espace et les variétés algébriques à trois dimensions , 1933
• Les surfaces algébriques non rationnelles de genres arithmétique et géométrique nuls , Paris: Hermann 1934
• La théorie des surfaces et l'espace réglé (géométrie projective différentielle) , 1934
• Les transformations birationnelles de l'espace , 1934
• Les involutions cycliques appartenant à une surface algébrique , Paris: Hermann 1935
• Les géométries , Paris: A. Colin, 1937
• Observations sur les variétés algébraiques à trois dimensions sur lesquelles l'opération d'adjonction est périodique , 1940
• Sur la structure des points unis des homographies cycliques du plan , Brussels: Palais des académies 1941
• Introduction à la géométrie supérieure , 1946
• Analysis mathématique , 1946
• Les géométries cayleyennes et les univers d'Einstein et de De Sitter , Liège 1947
• Géométrie algébrique , 2 volumes, Liège: Sciences et Lettres 1948, 1949 (Volume 1: Transformations birationnelles et géométrie hyperespatielle , Volume 2: Géométrie sur une courbe algébrique, du plan )
• Correspondances entre deux courbes algébriques , Paris: Gauthier-Villars 1949
• Leçons de geometrie analytique à trois dimensions
• Esquisse d'une histoire des sciences mathématiques en Belgique , Brussels: Office de publicité, 1943 (60 pages)
• Théorie des involutions cycliques appartenant à une surface algébrique et applications , Rome: Ed. Cremonese 1963
• La géométrie différentielle des surfaces considérées dans l'espace réglé , Brussels 1964

literature

• Francois Jongman: Nouvelle Biography Nationale, Volume 4, 1997, 188–191
• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 438

Web links

• Biography at Bestor - Belgian Science and Technology Online Resources (Dutch)
• Literature by and about Lucien Godeaux in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)