Olinde Rodrigues
Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (born October 6, 1795 in Bordeaux , † December 17, 1851 in Paris ) was a French mathematician, banker and social reformer.
Life
Rodrigues' father was a Jewish accountant, banker, and stock trader, whose family likely came from Portugal. Olinde was born in Bordeaux, the oldest of eight children, but soon moved with the family to Paris. There he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then studied at the newly founded University of Paris after he was first (before his old classmate Michel Chasles ) in the entrance exams for the elite schools École polytechnique and École normal supérieure . It is possible that Jews were no longer admitted to the two French elite schools by then. In 1816 he received his doctorate in mathematics there. He then became a banker and made his fortune, including financing the French railroad system. This was partly due to the fact that, as a Jew, he had no chance of a mathematics chair with the onset of the reaction. Rodrigues was active in the socialist movement and supported, for example, Henri de Saint-Simon , whom he helped back on his feet in 1823 after a suicide attempt and whom he supported financially, and after his death became one of the leaders of the Saint-Simonists, but separated in 1832 of them when some ideas became too radical for him.
plant
In his dissertation he gave the Rodrigues formula for Legendre polynomials (published in Mémoire sur l'attraction des sphéroïdes. ), Rediscovered independently by James Ivory and Carl Gustav Jacobi in 1835 ( Charles Hermite and Heinrich Eduard Heine attributed it to Rodrigues again) .
Today he is best known for a work from 1840 (Annales de Gergonne) , in which he represented rotations in three-dimensional space with the help of quaternions , which were later rediscovered (1843) by William Rowan Hamilton . Rodrigues also correctly associated half the angle with quaternion rotations (as opposed to Hamilton), corresponding to the representation of a double superposition of the rotation group . He also examined infinitesimal rotations, anticipating results from the theory of Lie groups . The Rodrigues formula from this subject area is associated with his name.
Another result of Rodrigues on combinatorics (a generating function for the number of errors in permutations of objects, Liouvilles Journal 1839) was rediscovered by Leonard Carlitz in 1970. A recurrence of Rodrigues for the division of a polygon into triangles was developed by Eugen Netto added to his textbook combinatorics.
Surname
Occasionally his name is misquoted in the literature. Élie Cartan, for example, cited him as the authors Olinde and Rodrigues. Incidentally, Olinde is a first name that he adopted as a "French first name" when he was a child when the Jews were naturalized in France.
See also
literature
- Simon Altmann, Eduardo L. Ortiz (eds.): Mathematics and Social Utopias in France. Olinde Rodrigues and his Times (= History of Mathematics. Vol. 28). American Mathematical Society et al., Providence RI 2005, ISBN 0-8218-3860-1 (Conference at Imperial College, London 2001).
- Simon L. Altmann: Hamilton, Rodrigues, and the Quaternion Scandal. In: Mathematics Magazine. Vol. 62, No. 5, 1989, ISSN 0025-570X , pp. 291-308.
- Simon L. Altmann: Rotations, Quaternions and Double Groups. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986, ISBN 0-19-855372-2 (Also: Dover, Mineola NY 2005, ISBN 0-486-44518-6 ).
- Jeremy J. Gray : Olinde Rodrigues' paper of 1840 on Transformation Groups. In: Archive for History of Exact Sciences. Vol. 21, No. 4, 1980, ISSN 0003-9519 , pp. 375-385, doi : 10.1007 / BF00595376 .
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Olinde Rodrigues. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rodrigues, Olinde |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Rodrigues, Benjamin Olinde (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French mathematician, banker and social reformer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 6, 1795 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bordeaux |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 17, 1851 |
| Place of death | Paris |