Simon Antoine Jean L'Huilier

Simon Antoine Jean Lhuilier ( born April 24, 1750 in Geneva, † March 28, 1840, ibid ) was a Swiss mathematician who was known among other things for his contributions to differential calculus.

Life and work

Lhuilier was the son of Laurent Lhuilier and Suzanne Constance mat. The ancestors of the family were forced to flee in 1691 to Geneva because of belonging to the Huguenots because of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Early on he showed himself mathematics facing, so that he turned down an inheritance, he would have received under the condition to join the clergy. In Geneva, he was taught by Louis Bertrand and Georges- Louis Le Sage. Le Sage gave him a job as a private tutor.

1775 wrote Christoph Friedrich Pfleiderer of a prize essay on a topic of physics. Le Sage advised his students Lhuilier to attend, which he did, but he chose not a physical but a mathematical topic. Lhuilier won the award in 1780 and was able to publish a mathematical textbook in Poland. Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski invited him to come to Poland and to teach his son what Lhuilier also accepted. He stayed 11 years in Poland and devoted himself to mathematical studies and published many writings.

1784 wrote the Berlin Academy of Sciences organized a competition on the mathematical concept of infinity. Lhuilier won the competition in 1786 and his prize essay was published. In his work, he led many still common expressions of the differential calculus one, such as the term lim - which was in fact already used by him in his Polish textbook of 1780.

From 1789 he stayed for some time at his friend Pfleiderer in Tübingen, who held a chair of mathematics there. Lhuilier a chair of mathematics at Leiden was offered, but he declined. He was from 1795 Professor of Mathematics at the Academy of Geneva, a position he held until his retirement in 1823.

In 1795 he married Marie Cartier and had two children with her. He was a member of the Royal Society, of the Academies of Berlin, Göttingen and St. Petersburg, was rector of the Academy of Geneva, and for some time President of the Legislative Council in Geneva.

In 1811 he wrote a paper with counter-examples of polyhedra for which the Eulerian Polyedersatz not the case, published 1813 in abbreviated form in the Annales des Mathématiques by Joseph Gergonne. Among them were polyhedra with holes and other cases that in the formula for the Euler characteristic found their topological interpretation later.