René de Possel

Lucien Alexandre Charles René de Possel ( born February 7, 1905 in Marseille, † 1974 in Paris) was a French mathematician who was one of the founders of Bourbaki and later was a computer science pioneer in France.

Life

Possel went to Marseille to school and attended the École Normale Supérieure in 1923. During his doctoral work, he visited with a Rockefeller scholarship, universities in Munich, Göttingen and Berlin. He published a first work on conformal mapping. In 1933 he received his doctorate.

In 1933 he was in Marseille Maître de conférences and 1934 in the same position at the University of Clermont- Ferrand, where he was a colleague of Szolem Mandelbrojt. During their weekly visits in Paris emerged from meetings with old classmates the idea of ​​Bourbaki. There he was responsible for the first draft for the presentation of integration theory. However, due to disputes with André Weil he left the group.

In 1936 he published a book on game theory ( Sur la théorie des jeux de hasard mathématique et de reflexion ), who was also devoted one of his last works 1968 ( about Nim games ). In 1935 he published a theory of differentiation in abstract measure spaces.

He became a professor in Besancon and from 1938 in Clermont -Ferrand. In 1941 he became a professor in Algiers. In 1959 he became Professor of Numerical Mathematics in Paris. The Institute Blaise Pascal CNRS he pioneered in the field of image recognition. 1960 until its reorganization in 1969, he was Director of the Institute as successor to Louis Couffignal. He was instrumental in the founding of the Institut de Programmation later.