Edmond Laguerre

Edmond Nicolas Laguerre ( born April 9, 1834 in Bar-le- Duc; † August 14, 1886 in Bar- le- Duc) was a French mathematician.

Laguerre attended the Ecole Polytechnique in spite of health problems from 1852. While still a student, he published his first mathematical work there in 1853. After graduating in 1854, he was an artillery officer and worked in a munitions factory in Strasbourg, before returning in 1864 as a teacher at the Ecole Polytechnique. In 1874, he was there examiners and 1883 professor of mathematical physics at the Collège de France. In 1886 he suffered a health breakdown which forced him to give up his chair.

He was one of the founders of modern geometry, where Laguerre geometry, Laguerre transform and Laguerre inversion are named after him. He also made ​​significant contributions to the theory of algebraic equations and the theory of continued fractions. He also examined the approximation theory and found here the orthogonal Laguerre polynomials (1879 ), which are the solutions of the Laguerre differential equation. A sample examined by him and George Pólya class of entire functions is called Laguerre - Pólya class today.

In 1867 he was independent of Gaston Darboux a geometric proof of the addition theorem of elliptic curves (using the closing rate of Poncelet ).

He was married and had two daughters.

The asteroid ( 26357 ) Laguerre was named after him.

Writings

• Oeuvres, two volumes, Gauthier -Villars, Paris, 1898, 1905 (Editor Charles Hermite, Henri Poincaré, Eugène Rouché ), new edition 1972
• Recherches sur la géométrie de direction; méthodes de transformation; anticaustiques, Gauthier -Villars, Paris, 1885