20th-century French mathematicians

Georges_Bouligand

Georges Louis Bouligand (13 October 1889 – 12 April 1979) was a French mathematician. He worked in analysis, mechanics, analytical and differential geometry, topology, and mathematical physics. He is known for introducing the concept of paratingent cones and contingent cones.

Michel_Demazure

Michel Demazure (French: [dəmazyʁ]; born 2 March 1937) is a French mathematician. He made contributions in the fields of abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and computer vision, and participated in the Nicolas Bourbaki collective. He has also been president of the French Mathematical Society and directed two French science museums.

Adrien_Douady

Adrien Douady (French: [adʁijɛ̃ dwadi]; 25 September 1935 – 2 November 2006) was a French mathematician born in La Tronche, Isère. He was the son of Daniel Douady and Guilhen Douady.Douady was a student of Henri Cartan at the École normale supérieure, and initially worked in homological algebra. His thesis concerned deformations of complex analytic spaces. Subsequently, he became more interested in the work of Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia and made significant contributions to the fields of analytic geometry and dynamical systems. Together with his former student John H. Hubbard, he launched a new subject, and a new school, studying properties of iterated quadratic complex mappings. They made important mathematical contributions in this field of complex dynamics, including a study of the Mandelbrot set. One of their most fundamental results is that the Mandelbrot set is connected; perhaps most important is their theory of renormalization of (polynomial-like) maps. The Douady rabbit, a quadratic filled Julia set, is named after him.
Douady taught at the University of Nice and was a professor at the Paris-Sud 11 University, Orsay. He was a member of Bourbaki and an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966 at Moscow and again in 1986 in Berkeley.
He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1997, and was featured in the French animation project Dimensions.
He died after diving into the cold Mediterranean from a favourite spot near his vacation home in the Var.
His son, Raphael Douady, is also a noted mathematician and an economist.

Michel_Broué

Michel Broué (born 28 October 1946) is a French mathematician. He holds a chair at Paris Diderot University. Broué has made contributions to algebraic geometry and representation theory.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.He is the son of French historian Pierre Broué and the father of French director and screenwriter Isabelle Broué and of French journalist and radio producer Caroline Broué.

Henri_Berestycki

Henri Berestycki (born 25 March 1951) is a French mathematician who obtained his PhD from Université Paris VI – Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1975. His Dissertation was titled Contributions à l'étude des problèmes elliptiques non linéaires, and his doctoral advisor was Haïm Brezis. He was an L.E. Dickson Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1975–77, after which he returned to France to continue his research. He has made many contributions in nonlinear analysis, ranging from nonlinear elliptic equations, hamiltonian systems, spectral theory of elliptic operators, and with applications to the description of mathematical modelling of fluid mechanics and combustion. His current research interests include the mathematical modelling of financial markets, mathematical models in biology and especially in ecology, and modelling in social sciences (in particular, urban planning and criminology). For these latter topics, he obtained an ERC Advanced grant in 2012.
He worked at the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), then moved to an appointment as Professor at University Paris XIII (1983–1985). He became a Professor of Mathematics in 1988 at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI (1988–2001 of “exceptional class” since 1993), and became professor at École normale supérieure, Paris (1994–1999), and part-time professor at the École Polytechnique (1987–1999). He is also a visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, and was also co-director of the Stevanovich Center of Financial Mathematics in Chicago. He is currently the Directeur d'études (Research Professor) at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), since 2001.

Yvonne_Choquet-Bruhat

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (French: [ivɔn ʃɔkɛ bʁy.a] ; born 29 December 1923) is a French mathematician and physicist. She has made seminal contributions to the study of Einstein's general theory of relativity, by showing that the Einstein equations can be put into the form of an initial value problem which is well-posed. In 2015, her breakthrough paper was listed by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity as one of thirteen 'milestone' results in the study of general relativity, across the hundred years in which it had been studied.She was the first woman to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences and is a Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur.

Édouard_Goursat

Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat (21 May 1858 – 25 November 1936) was a French mathematician, now remembered principally as an expositor for his Cours d'analyse mathématique, which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. It set a standard for the high-level teaching of mathematical analysis, especially complex analysis. This text was reviewed by William Fogg Osgood for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. This led to its translation into English by Earle Raymond Hedrick published by Ginn and Company. Goursat also published texts on partial differential equations and hypergeometric series.