Henri Padé

Henri Eugène Padé ( born December 17, 1863 in Abbeville, † July 9, 1953 in Aix -en- Provence) was a French mathematician, known for the Padé approximation.

Padé went to Abbeville and from 1881 at the Lycée St. Louis to school in Paris. From 1883 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where he graduated in 1886, his teacher. In addition to his teaching profession, he also published mathematical work and went in 1889/90 to Felix Klein (whose Erlanger program in 1891 he translated into French ) and Hermann Amandus Schwarz to Leipzig and Göttingen. In 1892 he earned his doctorate under Charles Hermite at the Sorbonne ( Sur la représentation d'une fonction par approchée of rational fractions ). He examined the today Padé approximations called approximation functions for rational functions (fractions of polynomials ). These were, however, already known mathematicians of the 18th century as Daniel Bernoulli, Joseph -Louis Lagrange and Leonhard Euler and later as Carl Gustav Jacobi, Hermite itself and in particular Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (Dissertation, 1870). Padé developed the theory systematically in the following years and showed their applicability. After his doctorate, he was from 1893 teacher in Lille and from 1897 Maître de conférences at the university of Lille as a successor to Emile Borel. In 1902 he became professor of mechanics in Poitiers and 1903 in Bordeaux. In 1906 he received the grand prize of the French Academy for his work on approximations. In 1908 he became rector of the Academy in Besancon, 1917 in Dijon and 1923 until his retirement in 1934 Rector of the University of Aix -Marseille.