Joseph Tilly

Joseph Tilly, Joseph -Marie De Tilly, ( born August 16, 1837 in Ypres, † August 4, 1906 in Munich) was a Belgian mathematician and military.

Life

Tilly was an artillery officer and taught in this context, from 1858 to his regiment geometry school. He also began self geometrical researches to operate and made independently by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, from whom he heard in 1866 about 1860 discoveries to non-Euclidean geometry. Even otherwise, he had no contact with academic research. In 1870 he published a work on non-Euclidean mechanics ( Études de méchanique abstraite ), an area which he founded and through which he caught the attention of the mathematician Jules Hoüel Guillaume, with whom he corresponded from 1870 to 1885. It was followed by two essays on the axiomatic foundations of metric geometry ( Riemann, Lobatschewskische and Euclidean ).

Tilly was later director of the arsenal in Antwerp and director of the Ecole Militaire. There they banned him from the teaching of analysis, as there had been complaints about a scientific training to the officers. As he ran he was dismissed in December 1899 and 1900 forced to retire. At his farewell he was lieutenant general.

He also wrote a history of the first hundred years of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences from 1772 to 1872.

In 1870 he became a corresponding and 1878 a full member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and was its president in 1887.