scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1433399
Catalan's life 1814-1894 covers most of the 19th country, much of it in Paris in very turbulent times: 1830, 1848, 1853. This is a well written, lively biography with six chapters on life followed by two evaluating the man (family, republican, partisan) and his mathematics. The bibliography (100 items) is designed to be neither comprehensive nor complete, but it is food for manuscript sources and archives. The index (12 pp.) is good but the man everyone loves to hate, Leverrier (p. 84-85), is missing. The first chapter covers 1814-1833, his birth, early politics, education, entry as no. 53 into the École polytechnique in 1833. The second, 1833-1838, brings in Lamé and Liouville, the dismissal of a whole class for rioting, his marriage, re-entry into the École polytechnique, and graduating as no. 13. The third, 1839-1851, covers his early professional life as examiner and tutor at the École, with yet more republican politics, the Belgian prize for multiple integrals with change of variables and determinants, the disaster of 1844 -- dismissal and enmity with Serret, Bertrand, Bonnet, and then school teaching. The fourth chapter, 1852-1865, shows the difficulty of publishing scientific papers in a Paris controlled by antipathetic academics, and school teaching still. The fifth chapter, 1865-1894, sees him to calmer waters in Liège. The sixth chapter reveals the ins and outs of an Academy election in Paris, 1872-1875, where favours are called in on all sides, even for the Prussians. This is a page-turner, short enough to be read in the one sitting, bouyant in the face of adversity, not afraid to show the various faces, attractive and hideous, of French society at his time, erecting no façade to cover the political biases of Left and Right.
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