Charles Méray

Hugues Charles Robert Méray ( born November 12, 1835 in Chalon -sur -Saône, † February 2nd 1911 in Dijon ) was a French mathematician.

Méray studied 1854-1857 at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and was a high school teacher in St. Quentin. From 1859 he interrupted his teaching career and lived for seven years in his home town of Chalon- sur -Saône. From 1866 he taught at the University of Dijon, where he was professor of mathematics and stayed the rest of his career.

Méray dealt with the foundations of mathematics and calculus at a time when this was rarely prosecuted in France and therefore also found little attention. It was 1869, the first rigorous treatment of the arithmetic of irrational numbers, even before Richard Dedekind ( continuity and irrational numbers 1872) and Georg Cantor (1871 ). His works, in which he ties in Joseph -Louis Lagrange, in which he introduces before Cantor fundamental sequences were recognized only later. His first work was followed by the rigorous justification of Analysis (similar around the same time, Karl Weierstrass in Germany ), in particular his book Nouveau précis d'analyze infinitesimal of 1872.