Léon Motchane

Léon Motchane ( born June 19, 1900 in Saint Petersburg, † 17 January 1990 in Paris) was a French mathematician and managers. He is the founder of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques ( IHES ).

Motchane was the son of half- Swiss, half- Russian parents. He studied in St. Petersburg, Russia left after the revolution in 1918 and followed his mother and his brother to Switzerland (his father followed a year later ), where he studied in Lausanne until 1921. He was there for a year assistant in the Physics Faculty. To support his family he had to work and went first in 1921 as an agent of an artist and later an employee of an insurance to Berlin. In 1924 he settled in France, where he rose to prosperity as a manager. In the 1930s, he acquired French citizenship.

During the occupation of France in World War II, he was involved in the underground publishing house Éditions de minuite. In the publisher, he published under the pseudonym Thimerais (La pensée patiente, 1943, Elements de doctrine, 1944). He was also in the Resistance and was also wounded, for which he received the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance with Rosette.

Always mathematically interested ( in his youth he had studied mathematics, but was unable to complete ), it was created in 1954 received his doctorate in advanced age with Gustave Choquet in mathematics. Already in the 1930s, he published mathematical work and in 1933 became a member of the Société Mathématique de France. After the war he published several papers in the Journal of the Academy of Sciences ( Compte Rendu Acad. Sci. ) On theoretical physics and mathematics. He was well known in Paris with eminent scientists like Francis Perrin and Paul Montel.

Inspired by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS ) in Princeton, which he visited in 1958, he decided a similar institution for Europe in France to found, the IHES. He had the support of the IAS Director Robert Oppenheimer and secured funding through his contacts in the industry ( for example, Jacques Ballet, Pierre Dreyfus, André Grand Pierre, Maurice Ponte, Arnaud de Vogue ). It was the first major endeavor in Paris to found an independent institution since the Pasteur Institute. The IHES was from 1962 located in Bures -sur -Yvette, near Paris. Motchane was its first director from 1958 to 1971 ., There appeared in the early years, among others, Jean Dieudonné and Alexander Grothendieck who revolutionized there with a group of students in the 1960s, the Algebraic Geometry. In 1966 he took for his Grothendieck Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow in reception, the Grothendieck boycotted for political reasons.

His successor as director IHES 1971 Nicolaas Kuiper. Motchane initially retired to Aix -en- Provence, before returning to Paris. He devoted himself to mathematical work, but remained Vice- President of the IHES and in 1978 became its Honorary President.

Motchane was married to the IHES secretary Annie Rolland. He is the father of the politician Didier Motchane (* 1931) and the Physics professor at the University of Paris VII, Jean- Loup Motchane.

He was a good pianist and chess player.