Paul's appeal

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Émile Appeal (1921)

Paul Émile Appell (born September 27, 1855 in Strasbourg , France, † October 24, 1930 in Paris ) was a French mathematician .

Life

The appeal came from a Catholic family in Alsace devoted to France ; his father had a dye works in Ritterhus. Roll call was also an ardent French patriot and after the death of his father moved to a French-speaking high school. After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 (during the Franco-Prussian War , Appell experienced the siege of Strasbourg) by the German Empire, he moved to Nancy , where he befriended Henri Poincaré . In 1873 he began his studies at the École normal supérieure in Paris, where he graduated as the best in 1876 and at the same time did his doctorate in mathematics. In 1881 he married a niece of Joseph Bertrand (and Charles Hermite ). In 1885 he became a professor of mechanics at the Sorbonne . In 1892 he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences . From 1903 to 1920 he was dean of the faculty of science at the University of Paris and from 1920 to 1925 rector. He was very active in state committees for teaching reform. During the Dreyfus affair he got involved with Dreyfus, who like him came from Alsace. During the First World War he founded Secours National, which u. a. assisted civilian victims of the war, and thereafter he was Secretary General of the French legation to the League of Nations in Geneva in the 1920s . In December 1911 he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg ; since 1925 he was an honorary member.

Appell dealt with geometry, analysis (algebraic functions, differential equations) and especially with mechanics, in which he u. a. 1878 applied elliptical functions to pendulum motion. His book on elliptic functions and their applications appeared in 1897 and a two-volume work with Édouard Goursat on algebraic functions and their integrals in 1895. The so-called Appell's equations (1899) represent the most general equations of motion of mechanical systems. From 1921 his five-volume Traité de Mécanique rationnelle appeared . In 1880 he introduced the sequence of polynomials named after him, the nth term of which is derived as n times the previous one. With Joseph Kampé de Fériet he published a book in 1915 on the hypergeometric function and its generalization.

Appell had three daughters, one of whom married Émile Borel . In 1885 he was president of the Société Mathématique de France .

Web links

Commons : Paul Appell  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ^ Appell regularly visited Alsace on vacation, spying for the French government. That is why he was imprisoned once (1889).
  2. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724: Appell, Paul Émile. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed November 29, 2019 (Russian).


personal data
SURNAME Roll call, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Appeal, Paul Émile
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Strasbourg
DATE OF DEATH October 24, 1930
Place of death Paris