Paul Mansion

Paul Mansion (born June 3, 1844 in Belle-Maison, Marchin , near Huy (Belgium) , † April 16, 1919 in Ghent ) was a Belgian mathematician and science historian.

He went to school in Ghent and received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Ghent in 1867 under Félix Dauge on the transformation behavior of elliptical functions. In the same year he began to teach mathematics at the University of Ghent as the successor to Mathias Schaar (1817–1867), who had recently died, and became an associate professor in 1870 and a full professor in 1874. In 1910 he retired.

Mansion translated, for example, Bernhard Riemann , Julius Plücker and Alfred Clebsch into French and the Divine Comedy by Dante . He published on the history of mathematics and astronomy, although he took an orthodox Catholic point of view when assessing Copernicus , Kepler and Galileo . In mathematics, he dealt with analysis, probability theory and non-Euclidean geometry.

With Eugène Catalan and Joseph Neuberg he founded the Nouvelle correspondance mathématique in 1874 , which appeared until 1880, and in 1881 he founded the journal Mathesis with Catalan and Neuberg , which he published until 1910.

In 1882 he became a corresponding and in 1887 a full member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and in 1903 its president.

He is the father of the linguist Joseph Mansion (1877–1937), a specialist in Sanskrit and Dutch in Liège, and the father of the philosopher and Aristotle specialist Suzanne Mansion (1916–1981), and of Augustin Mansion (1882–1966), philosopher in Leo and Aristotle Specialist.

Fonts

• Theory of partial differential equations of the first order , J. Springer 1892 (the French original was an award publication for the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences, published in their Mémoires 1875)

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Paul Mansion. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .