René Louis Baire

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René-Louis Baire

René Louis Baire (born January 21, 1874 in Paris , † July 5, 1932 in Chambéry ) was a French mathematician . Baire is considered to be one of the founders of the modern theory of real functions . In particular, he is known for Baire's category theorem .

Life

Baire was the son of a little well-to-do tailor. He was an excellent student and, thanks to scholarships, was able to attend the Lycée Lakanal and the Lycée Henri IV, and distinguished himself in the national exams for the elite schools (Concours Général). He studied from 1892 at the École normal supérieure , where he heard, among other things, mathematics from Henri Poincaré (whom he assisted in editing his thermodynamics lectures), Charles Hermite and Émile Picard and in 1894 received his degree in mathematics and physics, and was thereafter High school teacher in Troyes and from 1896 in Bar-le-Duc (where he had to take a break for almost a year because of his health). In addition, he worked on his dissertation on discontinuous functions and received a scholarship to stay with Vito Volterra in Italy . In 1899 he received his doctorate in Paris (the examiners included Gaston Darboux , Paul Appell and Émile Picard) and in 1901 he became professor (Maitre de conférences) in Montpellier , held the Peccot lectures at the Collège de France in 1904 and was at the university from 1905 (Faculté des Sciences) Dijon (Chargé de cours), where he became professor in 1907. Baire had been sick since his youth and eventually had to give up his profession (both research and teaching). In addition to problems with the esophagus, he had psychological and psychosomatic problems (depression, agoraphobia ), which temporarily prevented the concentration necessary for scientific work. In 1914 he went to Alèsia and then to Lausanne for a cure and had to spend the First World War there. He went through financially difficult times there during the First World War. In the 1920s he received honors (in 1919 he received the Prix opponent of the Académie des sciences, became a Knight of the Legion of Honor and in 1922 a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences ) but not the hoped-for professorship in Paris. In 1925 he retired as a professor in Dijon and received a pension, which, however, quickly fell apart during the inflationary years. A letter to his brother Georges dated June 24, 1932, in which he wrote about his poor health and depression (in his own words he could hardly eat anything and also believed that he had meningitis), alarmed the family and his brother sent his wife to Chambery to see him. She called for a doctor, but he said he was not lacking anything serious or that his ailments were psychosomatic in nature. Shortly before his death he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Chambéry-Basson, where he died soon after on July 5th.

Baire saw himself inadequately appreciated by his contemporaries and in competition with Henri Lebesgue , who, although younger, had a steep career. The reset he felt was one of the reasons for his depression. From 1898 he was in correspondence with Émile Borel and with Charles-Jean de La Vallée Poussin , with whom he later fell out. De La Vallée Poussin made the ideas of Baire known to wider circles in his analysis course.

Like Borel and Lebesgue, he was a supporter of Cantor's set theory in France, which he used consistently in his work.

Arnaud Denjoy was one of his students .

See also

Fonts

  • Sur les fonctions de variable réelles, dissertation 1899, published in Milan 1899, archives
  • Théorie des nombres irrationels, des limites et de la continuité, 1905, 1912, 1920
  • Leçons sur les théories générales de l'analyse, 2 volumes, 1907, 1908
  • Leçons sur la théorie des fonctions discontinues, Paris, 1905, 1930 (editor Arnaud Denjoy)
  • Sur la représentation des fonctions discontinues, Acta mathematica, Volume 30, 1906, pp. 1-48, Volume 32, 1909, pp. 97-179

literature

  • René Baire: Oeuvres Scientifique, Paris 1990 (with essays by Pierre Dugac and Pierre Lelong )
  • Pierre Costabel : Baire, René Louis . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 1 : Pierre Abailard - LS Berg . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1970, p. 406-408 .
  • Pierre Dugac : Notes et documents sur la vie et l'oeuvre de René Baire, Archive for History of Exact Science, Volume 15, 1976, p. 297
  • Lettres de René Baire à Émile Borel, Cahiers du séminaire d'histoire des mathématiques, Volume 11, 1990, pp. 33-120, numdam
  • Pierre Dugac (ed.): Lettres à René Baire, Cahiers du Séminaire d'Histoire des Mathématiques, Volume 1, 1980, pp. 37-50, numdam

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ He had also received admission to the Ecole Polytechnique, but decided on the ENS
  2. ↑ Pierre Dugac, Notes et documents sur la vie et l'œuvre de René Baire, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, Volume 15, 1976, p. 313
personal data
SURNAME Baire, René Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baire, René
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH July 5, 1932
Place of death Chambéry , France