Mathematician:Mathematicians/Sorted By Nation/France
For more comprehensive information on the lives and works of mathematicians through the ages, see the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, created by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson.
- The army of those who have made at least one definite contribution to mathematics as we know it soon becomes a mob as we look back over history; 6,000 or 8,000 names press forward for some word from us to preserve them from oblivion, and once the bolder leaders have been recognised it becomes largely a matter of arbitrary, illogical legislation to judge who of the clamouring multitude shall be permitted to survive and who be condemned to be forgotten.
- -- Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics, 1937, Victor Gollancz, London
France
$\text {1201}$ – $\text {1600}$
Levi ben Gershon $($$\text {1288}$ – $\text {1344}$$)$
French Jewish philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, physician and astronomer/astrologer.
Notable for publishing an early proof using the principle of mathematical induction.
Anticipated Galileo's error theory.
One of the first astronomers to estimate the distance of the fixed stars to a reasonable degree of accuracy (of the order of $100$ light years).
Refuted Claudius Ptolemy's model of astronomy by direct observation, paving the way for the new model of Nicolaus Copernicus more than $2$ centuries later.
Was involved in a lively debate about Euclid's $5$th postulate, and whether it could be derived from the other $4$.
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Jean Buridan $($$\text {c. 1301}$ – $\text {c. 1359 - 1362}$$)$
French philosopher who focused in particular on logic and the works of Aristotle.
Pupil of William of Ockham.
Sowed the seeds of the Copernican Revolution in Europe.
Developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia, and an important development in the history of medieval science.
Most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's Ass, but this does not actually appear in his extant writings.
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Nicole Oresme $($$\text {c. 1323}$ – $\text {1382}$$)$
French philosopher and mathematician best known for his many writings.
Known for being critical of the writings of Aristotle, an unusual philosophical position for his day.
Defined the power of a number to a non-integral exponent.
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Nicolas Chuquet $($$\text {1445 or 1455}$ – $\text {1488 or c. 1500}$$)$
French mathematician who first treated powers of unknowns systematically.
Inventor of the words billion for $10^{12}$, trillion for $10^{18}$, and so on.
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Charles de Bouvelles $($$\text {c. 1475}$ – $\text {c. 1567}$$)$
French mathematician and philosopher who introduced the hypotrochoid as a technique for Squaring the Circle.
It is suggested by some sources that he was also the first to investigate the cycloid.
Credited with finding the first odd abundant number to be discovered: $45 \, 045$.
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Oronce Finé $($$\text {1494}$ – $\text {1555}$$)$
French mathematician and cartographer who was mainly a populariser and teacher.
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Peter Ramus $($$\text {1515}$ – $\text {1572}$$)$
French logician, humanist and political reformer who fell victim to religious war.
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François Viète $($$\text {1540}$ – $\text {1603}$$)$
French amateur mathematician, trained in law, who became a privy councillor under Henry IV of France.
Contributed to many of the early developments of trigonometry and algebra.
Pioneered the use of letters in algebraic equations.
One of the first to use decimal fractions as a matter of course in his published works.
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Joseph Justus Scaliger $($$\text {1540}$ – $\text {1609}$$)$
French religious leader and scholar
Expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and ancient Egyptian history.
Also had the ambition to be a mathematician, and made a failed attempt to square the circle.
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Pierre Hérigone $($$\text {1580}$ – $\text {1643}$$)$
French mathematician and astronomer of Basque origin.
Taught in Paris for most of his life.
His greatest influence was his invention of notation.
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Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac $($$\text {1581}$ – $\text {1638}$$)$
First to discuss the solution of indeterminate equations by means of continued fractions.
First member to hold Seat 13 of the Académie Française.
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André Jumeau $($$\text {1588}$ – $\text {1651}$$)$
French amateur mathematician and prior who found the third triperfect number $523 \, 776$.
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Étienne Pascal $($$\text {1588}$ – $\text {1679}$$)$
French tax official and lawyer who also had an interest in science and mathematics.
Noted, and respected, for being unusually honest and honourable in his demanding professional position.
Investigated what is now known as the Limaçon of Pascal.
Most famous, however, for being the father of Blaise Pascal.
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Marin Mersenne $($$\text {1588}$ – $\text {1648}$$)$
French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist.
Most famous for his work with Mersenne primes.
Claimed in $1644$ that the only primes $p \le 257$ for which $2^p - 1$ is prime are $2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127$ and $257$. Considering the tools he had at his disposal, he was uncannily accurate.
The first to determine the speed of sound through air.
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Girard Desargues $($$\text {1591}$ – $\text {1661}$$)$
French mathematician who is considered to be one of the founders of projective geometry.
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Jean Leurechon $($$\text {1591}$ – $\text {1670}$$)$
French Jesuit priest, astronomer and mathematician, known for inventing the Pigeonhole Principle and naming the thermometer.
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Albert Girard $($$\text {1595}$ – $\text {1632}$$)$
Professional French lutenist who also studied mathematics, working in the fields of algebra, trigonometry and arithmetic.
Gave an inductive formula for the Fibonacci numbers.
First stated in $1632$ that every prime of the form $4 k + 1$ is the sum of two squares in only one way.
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René Descartes $($$\text {1596}$ – $\text {1650}$$)$
French mathematician and philosopher who is supposed to have invented the Cartesian coordinate system, and thence the field of analytic geometry.
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Jean Appier Hanzelet $($$\text {1596}$ – $\text {1647}$$)$
French printer and engraver who is believed by some to be the actual author of Récréations Mathématiques of $1624$, supposedly by H. van Etten.
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Pierre de Fermat $($$\text {c. 1600}$ – $\text {1665}$$)$
French lawyer, also an amateur mathematician famous for lots of things. Especially:
- Fermat's Little Theorem
- Claimed to have found a proof for what became known as Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has since been doubted that this is in fact the case (he may have been mistaken).
Although he claimed to have found proofs of many theorems, few of these have survived.
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$\text {1601}$ – $\text {1700}$
Gilles Personne de Roberval $($$\text {1602}$ – $\text {1675}$$)$
French mathematician whose work was a precursor to calculus.
Worked on the quadrature of surfaces and the cubature of solids.
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Pierre de Carcavi $($$\text {c. 1603}$ – $\text {1684}$$)$
French mathematician who was also a secretary of the National Library of France under Louis XIV.
Noted for his correspondence with Pierre de Fermat, Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, Evangelista Torricelli and René Descartes.
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Bernard Frénicle de Bessy $($$\text {c. 1604}$ – $\text {1674}$$)$
French mathematician who wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics.
Described all $880$ essentially different normal magic squares of order $4$.
Invented the Frénicle standard form, a standard representation of magic squares
Solved many problems created by Pierre de Fermat.
Discovered the cube property of the number $1729$ (Ramanujan number), later referred to as a taxicab number.
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Antoine Gombaud $($$\text {1607}$ – $\text {1684}$$)$
French gambler, writer, philosopher and amateur mathematician best known for his work in probability theory.
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Antoine Arnauld $($$\text {1612}$ – $\text {1694}$$)$
French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician.
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Claude Perrault $($$\text {1613}$ – $\text {1688}$$)$
French architect, best known for his participation in the design of the east façade of the Louvre in Paris.
Also achieved success as a physician and anatomist, and as an author.
Wrote treatises on physics and natural history.
The first to investigate the tractrix, which he did in $1670$.
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Blaise Pascal $($$\text {1623}$ – $\text {1662}$$)$
French mathematician and philosopher who explored probability theory and projective geometry.
Most famous for the construction now commonly known as Pascal's Triangle.
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Giovanni Domenico Cassini $($$\text {1625}$ – $\text {1712}$$)$
Italian/French mathematician, astronomer, engineer, and astrologer.
Most of his important discoveries were in the field of astronomy.
Not to be confused with his son, also called Jean-Dominique Cassini.
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Clément-Samuel Fermat $($$\text {1634}$ – $\text {1697}$$)$
The son of Pierre de Fermat.
Published a new edition in $1670$ of Bachet's translation of the Arithmetica of Diophantus.
This version included Pierre de Fermat's famous marginal notes
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Bernard Lamy $($$\text {1640}$ – $\text {1715}$$)$
French Oratorian, mathematician and theologian best known for formulating the Parallelogram of Force.
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Jacques Ozanam $($$\text {1640}$ – $\text {1718}$$)$
French mathematician renowned for the books he wrote, and for his philanthropy.
Published a set of trigonometric and logarithmic tables more accurate than any of the existing ones.
Identified three pairs of triangular numbers whose sum and difference are also triangular.
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Denis Papin $($$\text {1647}$ – $\text {1713}$$)$
French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine.
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Michel Rolle $($$\text {1652}$ – $\text {1719}$$)$
French mathematician best known for Rolle's Theorem.
Also noted for popularising the $n$th root sign.
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Pierre Varignon $($$\text {1654}$ – $\text {1722}$$)$
French mathematician whose principal contributions were to graphic statics and mechanics.
Friend of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and the Bernoulli family.
One of the earliest and strongest French advocates of infinitesimal calculus.
Exposed the errors in Michel Rolle's critique thereof.
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Guillaume de l'Hôpital $($$\text {1661}$ – $\text {1704}$$)$
French mathematician best known for L'Hôpital's Rule, although this was in fact discovered by Johann Bernoulli.
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Abraham de Moivre $($$\text {1667}$ – $\text {1754}$$)$
French mathematician best known for De Moivre's Formula.
Also noted for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
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Pierre Raymond de Montmort $($$\text {1678}$ – $\text {1719}$$)$
French mathematician who worked in probability theory.
The first to introduce the combinatorial study of derangements.
Also known for naming Pascal's triangle after Blaise Pascal, calling it Table de M. Pascal pour les combinaisons.
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Pierre Bouguer $($$\text {1698}$ – $\text {1758}$$)$
French mathematician, geophysicist, geodesist and astronomer.
The first known discoverer of what is now generally known as the Beer-Lambert-Bouguer Law.
Measured the acceleration of free-fall using a pendulum.
Was the first to notice that the period of a pendulum could be affected by the gravitational force exerted by a high mountain.
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Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis $($$\text {1698}$ – $\text {1759}$$)$
French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters.
Credited with having invented the principle of least action.
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$\text {1701}$ – $\text {1800}$
Alexis Fontaine des Bertins $($$\text {1704}$ – $\text {1771}$$)$
French mathematician who contributed to some of the early work on differential equations.
Credited with inventing the technique (independently of Leonhard Paul Euler and Alexis Claude Clairaut) of the use of integrating factors.
Did much of his work independently of others, and questions of precedence arose as a result.
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Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon $($$\text {1707}$ – $\text {1781}$$)$
French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopédiste.
Translated Isaac Newton's works on calculus into French.
His claim to fame in the world of mathematics stems from his thought experiment Buffon's Needle.
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Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille $($$\text {1713}$ – $\text {1762}$$)$
French astronomer who named $14$ out of the $88$ constellations.
Observed over $10 \, 000$ stars using just a half-inch refractor.
Constructing astronomical ephemerides and mathematical tables.
Calculated a table of eclipses for $1800$ years.
Determined that Earth is flatter at the South Pole than at the North Pole
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Alexis Claude Clairaut $($$\text {1713}$ – $\text {1765}$$)$
French mathematician, astronomer and geophysicist. Worked out the shape of the Earth.
Best known in mathematics for Clairaut's (differential) equation.
Credited with inventing the technique (independently of Leonhard Paul Euler and Alexis Fontaine des Bertins) of the use of integrating factors.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert $($$\text {1717}$ – $\text {1783}$$)$
French mathematician, physicist and philosopher best known for his contribution to the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra -- he produced a flawed proof which was later patched up by Gauss.
Devised a technique for solving the linear second order ODE with constant coefficients whose auxiliary equation has repeated roots.
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Jean-Étienne Montucla $($$\text {1725}$ – $\text {1799}$$)$
French mathematician and civil servant best known now for his work on the history of mathematics.
Wrote the first comprehensive history of mathematics, uncompleted at the time of his death.
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Étienne Bézout $($$\text {1730}$ – $\text {1783}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in number theory and algebra.
Also the author of widely-used textbooks.
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Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande $($$\text {1732}$ – $\text {1807}$$)$
French astronomer and writer.
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Jean-Charles de Borda $($$\text {1733}$ – $\text {1799}$$)$
French mathematician, physicist, and sailor.
Worked on problems in fluid dynamics.
Developed a ranked preferential voting system, the Borda count.
Constructed the metre based on the measurements of Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, thus helping to introduce the metric system to France.
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Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde $($$\text {1735}$ – $\text {1796}$$)$
French mathematician and musician mainly active in the fields of combinatorics.
Referred to by some as "the founder of the theory of determinants".
Best known nowadays for the Vandermonde determinant and the Chu-Vandermonde Identity.
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Joseph Louis Lagrange $($$\text {1736}$ – $\text {1813}$$)$
Italian-born French mathematician who made big advances in the fields of the calculus of variations and analytical mechanics.
Contributed to number theory and algebra.
Extended a lot of the fields established by Euler, and in turn laid down the groundwork for later explorations by Gauss and Abel.
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Charles-Augustin de Coulomb $($$\text {1736}$ – $\text {1806}$$)$
French military engineer and physicist.
Best known as the discoverer of what is now called Coulomb's Law.
Did important work on friction.
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René Just Haüy $($$\text {1743}$ – $\text {1822}$$)$
French priest and mineralogist best known for his work on crystal structure.
Helped establish the metric system.
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Gaspard Monge $($$\text {1746}$ – $\text {1818}$$)$
French mathematician who invented the field of descriptive geometry.
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Pierre-Simon de Laplace $($$\text {1749}$ – $\text {1827}$$)$
French mathematician and astronomer whose work greatly influenced the development of the mathematics governing astronomy.
Pioneered the field of mathematical physics.
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Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre $($$\text {1749}$ – $\text {1822}$$)$
French mathematician and astronomer.
Author of well-known books on the history of astronomy from ancient times to the 18th century.
Placed in charge of the mission to measure the meridian from Dunkirk to Rodez in the south of France, taking over the responsibility from Jean-Dominique de Cassini, who refused the mission for political reasons.
One of the first astronomers to derive astronomical equations from analytical formulas, formulating the trigonometrical identities now known as Delambre's Analogies.
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Adrien-Marie Legendre $($$\text {1752}$ – $\text {1833}$$)$
French mathematician, focusing in the fields of statistics, abstract algebra, number theory and analysis.
His work formed the basis for work by many others, including Gauss and Abel.
Gave an early proof of Fermat's Last Theorem for $n = 5$.
Attempted a proof of the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity in $1785$, but it was flawed. It was eventually proven by Gauss in $1798$.
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Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot $($$\text {1753}$ – $\text {1823}$$)$
French mathematician, physicist and politician.
Known as the Organizer of Victory in the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.
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Marc-Antoine Parseval $($$\text {1755}$ – $\text {1836}$$)$
French mathematician, most famous for what is now known as Parseval's Theorem, which presaged the unitarity of the Fourier transform.
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Louis François Antoine Arbogast $($$\text {1759}$ – $\text {1803}$$)$
French mathematician, and later politician, who pioneered the concept of discontinuous functions, further developing the work of Leonhard Paul Euler in this field.
This work was developed further by Augustin Louis Cauchy.
The first to conceive the calculus as a set of operational symbols.
Also the first to publish what is now known as Faà di Bruno's Formula.
Responsible for the law which introduced the decimal metric system to France.
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Paul Charpit de Ville Coer $($$\text {? c. 1760}$ – $\text {1784}$$)$
French mathematician about whom very little is known, not even his approximate date of birth.
Made some contributions to the science of differential equations, but died before he was able to get anything published.
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Christian Kramp $($$\text {1760}$ – $\text {1826}$$)$
French mathematician working mainly with factorials.
His main claim to fame is for being the one to introduce the Factorial sign: $!$
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François Peyrard $($$\text {1760}$ – $\text {1822}$$)$
French mathematician, educator and librarian.
One of the founders of the École Polytechnique, and its first librarian.
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Joseph Fourier $($$\text {1768}$ – $\text {1830}$$)$
French mathematician and physicist best known for the Fourier series and his application of this technique to the problem of heat conduction.
Also developed the technique of dimensional analysis, and discovered the greenhouse effect.
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François Joseph Français $($$\text {1768}$ – $\text {1810}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on partial differential equations.
Also had a career as a soldier in the forces of the French (revolutionary) government of the time.
The brother of Jacques Frédéric Français.
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François Joseph Servois $($$\text {1768}$ – $\text {1847}$$)$
French mathematician and military officer.
Worked in the fields of projective geometry, functional analysis and complex analysis.
First introduced (in $1814$) the concept of commutativity which till then had generally been taken for granted in all fields of mathematics.
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Napoleon Bonaparte $($$\text {1769}$ – $\text {1821}$$)$
Amateur French mathematician also famous as a military and political leader of France (in the same way that Henry Tudor was an amateur singer/songwriter whose hits included Greensleeves).
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Charles Haros $($$\text {$18$th Century}$ – $\text {$19$th Century}$$)$
French mathematician and geometer who flourished at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Known for his work on what later became known as the Farey sequence.
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Joseph Diez Gergonne $($$\text {1771}$ – $\text {1859}$$)$
French mathematician and logician, best known for founding and editing Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées.
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Jean-Baptiste Biot $($$\text {1774}$ – $\text {1862}$$)$
French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who co-discovered the Biot-Savart Law with Félix Savart, established the reality of meteorites, made an early balloon flight, and studied the polarization of light.
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Étienne Midy $($$\text {c. 1775}$ – $\text {c. 1850}$$)$
French mathematician about whom little is known.
Best known as the eponym of Midy's Theorem.
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André-Marie Ampère $($$\text {1775}$ – $\text {1836}$$)$
French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics".
Inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid (a term coined by him) and the electrical telegraph.
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Jacques Frédéric Français $($$\text {1775}$ – $\text {1833}$$)$
French mathematician whose work was mostly inspired by that of his brother François Joseph Français.
Famous for having published Jean-Robert Argand's work on the use of the complex plane to represent complex numbers.
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Marie-Sophie Germain $($$\text {1776}$ – $\text {1831}$$)$
French mathematician who contributed to differential geometry and number theory, and provided some insights into aspects of Fermat's Last Theorem.
She was completely self-taught (as women typically left education at a young age and were discouraged from pursuing academic interests) and contributed her early work under the pseudonym Monsieur LeBlanc.
Had Gauss and Lagrange as mentors, but apart from that, suffered throughout her career from prejudice against her gender.
Later in her career she contributed towards the mathematical theory of elasticity.
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Louis Poinsot $($$\text {1777}$ – $\text {1859}$$)$
French mathematician and physicist best known for his work in geometry and the embryonic field of graph theory.
Invented the field of geometrical mechanics.
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Siméon-Denis Poisson $($$\text {1781}$ – $\text {1840}$$)$
French mathematician and physicist best known for his work in probability theory and differential equations.
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Charles Julien Brianchon $($$\text {1783}$ – $\text {1864}$$)$
French mathematician and chemist who took up a career in Napoleon's artillery.
With Jean-Victor Poncelet, proved the Nine Point Circle Theorem in $1820$.
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French mechanical engineer, affiliated with the French government, and a physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics.
The Navier-Stokes equations refer eponymously to him, with George Gabriel Stokes.
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Jacques Philippe Marie Binet $($$\text {1786}$ – $\text {1856}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his contribution to the Binet-Cauchy Identity.
Recognized as the first to define the rules for matrix multiplication.
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Dominique François Jean Arago $($$\text {1786}$ – $\text {1853}$$)$
French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and politician.
Worked in the field of optics with Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
First person to construct an electromagnet.
As an active practical astronomer and geographer in troubled political times, once found himself arrested on charges of espionage.
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Augustin-Jean Fresnel $($$\text {1788}$ – $\text {1827}$$)$
French civil engineer and physicist, whose research in optics led to the almost universal acceptance of the wave theory of light in the 19th century.
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Jean-Victor Poncelet $($$\text {1788}$ – $\text {1867}$$)$
French mathematician and engineer who revived the field of projective geometry.
With Charles Julien Brianchon, proved the Nine Point Circle Theorem in $1820$.
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Augustin Louis Cauchy $($$\text {1789}$ – $\text {1857}$$)$
French Engineer and mathematician, from a suburb of Paris, which at the time was home to many leading mathematicians.
Wrote seven books and more than 700 papers in various fields of mathematics.
Made significant contributions in number theory, the theory of determinants, eigenvalues, ordinary and partial differential equations, permutation groups, and the foundation of calculus.
Famous for founding the theory of functions of a complex variable.
Argued by some as the founder of group theory.
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Félix Savart $($$\text {1791}$ – $\text {1841}$$)$
French physicist and mathematician who is primarily known for the Biot-Savart Law, which he discovered together with his colleague Jean-Baptiste Biot.
Mainly interested in acoustics and the study of vibrating bodies.
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Victor-Amédée Lebesgue $($$\text {1791}$ – $\text {1875}$$)$
French mathematician working on number theory. He was elected a member of the Académie des sciences in 1847.
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Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis $($$\text {1792}$ – $\text {1843}$$)$
French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist.
Best known for his work on the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference, leading to the Coriolis effect.
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Michel Chasles $($$\text {1793}$ – $\text {1880}$$)$
French mathematician known for his work in projective geometry, as well as for his contributions to harmonic analysis.
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Germinal Pierre Dandelin $($$\text {1794}$ – $\text {1847}$$)$
French mathematician, soldier, and professor of engineering, best known for Dandelin spheres.
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Gabriel Léon Jean Baptiste Lamé $($$\text {1795}$ – $\text {1870}$$)$
French mathematician who investigated curvilinear coordinate systems.
Studied the series of curves now known as Lamé curves.
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Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues $($$\text {1795}$ – $\text {1851}$$)$
French banker, mathematician, and social reformer.
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Irénée-Jules Bienaymé $($$\text {1796}$ – $\text {1878}$$)$
French mathematician mainly working in statistics, whose work can be considered as extending the work of Laplace.
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Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille $($$\text {1797}$ – $\text {1869}$$)$
French physicist and physiologist best known for giving his name to the poise.
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Pierre Frédéric Sarrus $($$\text {1798}$ – $\text {1861}$$)$
French mathematician who discovered a mnemonic rule for solving the determinant of a 3-by-3 matrix, named Sarrus' Scheme.
Demonstrated the Fundamental Lemma of Calculus of Variations.
Discovered Fermat pseudoprimes to base $2$, now known as Sarrus numbers or Poulet numbers.
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Camille-Christophe Gerono $($$\text {1799}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
French mathematician concerned mainly with geometry.
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Fortuné Landry $($$\text {1799}$ – $\text {1895}$$)$
French mathematician mainly working in the field of factorization of large integers.
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$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1900}$
Joseph Liouville $($$\text {1809}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
Active in the fields of number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry, topology, mathematical physics and astronomy.
Proved the existence of transcendental numbers.
Contributed the Sturm-Liouville theory to the field of mathematical physics, in collaboration with Charles Sturm.
Pioneered the study of fractional calculus.
There are several theorems named after him, all in different areas of mathematics and physics.
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Auguste Bravais $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1863}$$)$
French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais Law.
Also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
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Évariste Galois $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1832}$$)$
French mathematician famous for dying at the age of 20 as the result of a duel.
Despite his total collected works amounting to a mere 60 pages or so, he had a significant influence in the development of the field of group theory. He was in fact the first person to use the word group in a technical sense.
His innovative approach to the problem of the insolubility of the quintic led to the field known now as Galois theory.
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Pierre Alphonse Laurent $($$\text {1813}$ – $\text {1854}$$)$
French mathematician and first-rate military and civil engineer best known for his discovery of what is now known as a Laurent series.
Also published works on the theory of light polarization.
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Eugène Charles Catalan $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
French and Belgian mathematician who is most famous for his work in combinatorics and number theory.
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Louis Achille Brocot $($$\text {1817}$ – $\text {1878}$$)$
French clockmaker and amateur mathematician who discovered the Stern-Brocot tree in $1861$ independently of Moritz Abraham Stern.
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Charles Auguste Briot $($$\text {1817}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions.
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Jean-Claude Bouquet $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1885}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on differential geometry and on series expansions of functions and elliptic functions.
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Jean Bernard Léon Foucault $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1868}$$)$
French physicist best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of Earth's rotation.
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Claude Séraphin Moret-Blanc $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1886}$$)$
French mathematician who discovered some results in number theory.
Mainly known for the result Sequence of Dudeney Numbers.
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Pierre Ossian Bonnet $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1892}$$)$
French mathematician who made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces.
Mainly known for the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem.
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Léon-François-Antoine Aurifeuille $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
French mathematician after whom Aurifeuillian factorizations are named.
Also wrote a number of books.
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Jules Antoine Lissajous $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1880}$$)$
French physicist, after whom Lissajous figures are named.
Inventor of the Lissajous apparatus.
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Joseph Louis François Bertrand $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1900}$$)$
French mathematician working in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics.
He conjectured Bertrand's Postulate, in 1845, that there is at least one prime between $n$ and $2n - 2$ for every $n > 3$. This was proved in 1850 by Chebyshev, and hence it is also known as the Bertrand-Chebyshev Theorem.
Also wrote plenty on the history of mathematics.
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Charles Hermite $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1901}$$)$
French mathematician who did research mainly in the fields of number theory and analysis.
The first to prove that e is transcendental.
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Alphonse Armand Charles Georges Marie de Polignac $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1862}$$)$
French mathematician best known for De Polignac's Formula and Polignac's Conjecture.
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Jean François Théophile Pépin $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1904}$$)$
French mathematician who centred on number theory.
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Eugène Rouché $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in complex analysis and calculus.
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Edmond Nicolas Laguerre $($$\text {1834}$ – $\text {1886}$$)$
French mathematician whose main works were in the areas of geometry and complex analysis.
Investigated orthogonal polynomials, including the Laguerre polynomials.
Laguerre's method is a root-finding algorithm tailored to polynomials.
Laid the foundations of a geometry of oriented spheres.
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Émile Léonard Mathieu $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1890}$$)$
French mathematician known for his work in group theory and mathematical physics.
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Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
French mathematician who founded much of the field of group theory.
Also wrote the influential textbook Cours d'Analyse.
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Joseph-Émile Barbier $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
French astronomer and mathematician, best known for Barbier's Theorem on the perimeter of curves of constant width.
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Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
French mathematician and civil engineer who worked mainly in geometry.
He is best known for defining the Lemoine point of a triangle.
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Marie Alfred Cornu $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1902}$$)$
French physicist best known in mathematical circles for the Cornu spiral.
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Charles-Ange Laisant $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
French politician and mathematician who published some books and founded some journals.
Determined the number of digits in $9^{9^9}$.
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Joseph Valentin Boussinesq $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$
French mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to the theory of hydrodynamics, vibration, light, and heat.
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François Édouard Anatole Lucas $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his study of the Fibonacci numbers. As a result of his researches, discovered what are now known as the Lucas numbers.
In $1876$, proved that the Mersenne number $M_{127}$ is prime, and discovered that $M_{67}$ is actually composite.
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Jean-Gaston Darboux $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1917}$$)$
French mathematician who contributed to to geometry and mathematical analysis.
Did considerable important work on linear partial differential equations.
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Gaston Tarry $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
Amateur French mathematician whose most famous achievement was confirming in $1901$ that no $6 \times 6$ Graeco-Latin square is possible.
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Paul Tannery $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1904}$$)$
French mathematician and historian best known for his work on the history of Greek mathematics.
Edited the works of Diophantus, Fermat and Descartes.
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Pierre René Jean Baptiste Henri Brocard $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
French meteorologist and mathematician, in particular a geometer.
Best known for the Brocard points, the Brocard circle and the Brocard triangle.
Also known for the still unsolved Brocard's Problem.
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Émile Baudot $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
French telegraph engineer and one of the pioneers of telecommunications.
Inventor of the Baudot code.
Invented a multiplexed printing telegraph system that used his code, and allowed multiple transmissions over a single line.
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Achille Marie Gaston Floquet $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in analysis, especially in theory of differential equations.
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Georges Fontené $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$
French mathematician who worked in geometry, analytic geometry, linear algebra, elliptic functions and elliptic integrals.
Also studied hyperspaces and "courbes gauches".
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François Proth $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1879}$$)$
French farmer who was also a self-taught mathematician.
Known for his analysis of Proth numbers and Proth primes.
Formulated Gilbreath's Conjecture on successive differences of primes, $80$ years before Norman Laurence Gilbreath, but his proof was incorrect.
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Antoine Henri Becquerel $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1908}$$)$
French engineer and physicist who discovered radioactivity.
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Henri Poincaré $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
French mathematician and philosopher.
Often referred to as "The last universalist", as he was the last one able to master the whole of mathematics at the time. (Since then the field has grown too large.)
Introduced the field of special relativity.
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Charles Émile Picard $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$
French mathematician who made significant advances in the fields of:
Son-in-law of Charles Hermite.
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Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat $($$\text {1858}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in complex analysis.
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Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$
French engineer and mathematician who founded the field of nomography and invented the nomogram.
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Jules Antoine Richard $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$
French mathematician best known for Richard's Paradox.
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Paul Painlevé $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on differential equations and the emerging new physics.
Later in life became Prime Minister of France.
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Jacques Salomon Hadamard $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$
French mathematician who contributed in the fields of:
- Number Theory
- Complex Function Theory
- Differential Geometry
- Partial Differential Equations
- Functional Analysis
Most famous for proving the Prime Number Theorem in 1896, independently of Charles de la Vallée Poussin.
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Charles de la Vallée Poussin $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$
Belgian mathematician famous for proving the Prime Number Theorem, independently of Jacques Salomon Hadamard in $1896$.
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Élie Joseph Cartan $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$
Influential French mathematician who did fundamental work in the theory of Lie groups and their geometric applications.
Made significant contributions to mathematical physics, differential geometry, and group theory.
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Henri Claudius Rosaris Dulac $($$\text {1870}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$
French mathematician majoring in differential equations and real analysis.
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Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$
French mathematician working mainly in measure theory and its applications to probability theory.
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René-Louis Baire $($$\text {1874}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$
French mathematician who worked mainly on the theory of continuity and irrational numbers.
Most famous for the Baire Category Theorem.
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Henri Léon Lebesgue $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$
French mathematician famous mainly for his work on the theory of integral calculus.
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André-Louis Cholesky $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$
French military officer, geodesist, and mathematician.
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Paul Antoine Aristide Montel $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$
French mathematician who researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis.
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Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$
French mathematician and astronomer whose main contributions were in the field of analysis.
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Maurice René Fréchet $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$
French mathematician who made considerable advances in topology, and pioneered the concept of metric spaces.
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Victor Michael Jean-Marie Thébault $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$
French mathematician best known for propounding three specific problems in geometry.
Also contributed many problems to various mathematical journals.
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Arnaud Denjoy $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$
French mathematician known for his contributions in harmonic analysis and differential equations.
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Paul Pierre Lévy $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$
French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions.
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Georges Darmois $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$
French mathematician and statistician who pioneered in the theory of sufficiency, in stellar statistics, and in factor analysis.
One of the first French mathematicians to teach British mathematical statistics.
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Léon Nicolas Brillouin $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$
French physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid state physics, and information theory.
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Gaston Maurice Julia $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1978}$$)$
French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia Set.
His works were popularised by Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
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André Bloch $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$
French mathematician who is best remembered for his fundamental contribution to complex analysis.
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Aimé Ferrier $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$
French mathematician who discovered in $1951$ that $\dfrac {2^{148} + 1} {17}$ is prime, using a manual desk calculator.
This is now sometimes referred to as Ferrier's prime.
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Bernard Osgood Koopman $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1981}$$)$
French-born American mathematician, known for his work in ergodic theory, the foundations of probability, statistical theory and operations research.
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$1901$ and onward
François Le Lionnais $($$\text {1901}$ – $\text {1984}$$)$
French chemical engineer and writer, occasionally on mathematics.
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Antoine Isidore Marie Joseph Appert $($$\text {1903}$ – $\text {1992}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in topology.
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André Abraham Weil $($$\text {1906}$ – $\text {1998}$$)$
French mathematician who known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry.
Founding member and early leader of the Bourbaki group.
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Jean Alexandre Eugène Dieudonné $($$\text {1906}$ – $\text {1992}$$)$
French mathematician, notable for research in abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, and functional analysis.
Worked as a historian of mathematics, particularly in the fields of functional analysis and algebraic topology.
Closely involved with the Bourbaki group.
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Claude Chevalley $($$\text {1909}$ – $\text {1984}$$)$
French mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, class field theory, finite group theory, and the theory of algebraic groups.
Founding member of the Bourbaki group.
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Charles Pisot $($$\text {1910}$ – $\text {1984}$$)$
French mathematician best known as one of the primary investigators of the Pisot-Vijayaraghavan numbers.
Argued as being a significant influence in the development of Number Theory.
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Jean Grosjean $($$\text {1912}$ – $\text {2006}$$)$
French poet, writer and translator.
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Gustave Alfred Arthur Choquet $($$\text {1915}$ – $\text {2006}$$)$
French mathematician whose contributions include work in functional analysis, potential theory, topology and measure theory.
Creating the Choquet theory, the Choquet integral and the theory of capacities.
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Laurent-Moïse Schwartz $($$\text {1915}$ – $\text {2002}$$)$
French mathematician who pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function.
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Roger Apéry $($$\text {1916}$ – $\text {1994}$$)$
Greek-French mathematician most remembered for Apéry's Theorem.
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Jean-Louis Koszul $($$\text {1921}$ – $\text {2018}$$)$
French mathematician, best known for studying geometry and discovering the Koszul complex.
Second generation member of Bourbaki.
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Pierre Samuel $($$\text {1921}$ – $\text {2009}$$)$
French mathematician working mainly in the fields of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.
A second-generation member of the Bourbaki group.
Best known (and greatly appreciated) for the books he wrote.
Politically active in the spheres of social justice and environmentalism.
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René Frédéric Thom $($$\text {1923}$ – $\text {2002}$$)$
French mathematician who worked as a topologist, then moved on to aspects of what would later be called singularity theory.
One of the founders of catastrophe theory.
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Benoît B. Mandelbrot $($$\text {1924}$ – $\text {2010}$$)$
French-American mathematician of Polish origin famous for his work on fractals.
The Mandelbrot set is named for him.
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Claude Jacques Roger Berge $($$\text {1926}$ – $\text {2002}$$)$
French mathematician who is considered to be one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory.
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Jean-Pierre Albert Achille Serre $($$\text {b. 1926}$$)$
French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory.
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Michel André Kervaire $($$\text {1927}$ – $\text {2007}$$)$
French mathematician who made significant contributions to topology and algebra.
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Serge Lang $($$\text {1927}$ – $\text {2005}$$)$
French-American mathematician known for his work in number theory, and for the mathematics textbooks he wrote.
Member of the Bourbaki group.
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François Georges René Bruhat $($$\text {1929}$ – $\text {2007}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups
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Henri J. Nussbaumer $($$\text {b. 1931}$$)$
French mathematician and engineer who has written a few works on the fast fourier transform.
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Michel Hénon $($$\text {1931}$ – $\text {2013}$$)$
French mathematician and astronomer, nown for his contributions to stellar dynamics.
Made important contributions on the dynamical evolution of star clusters, in particular globular clusters.
Developed a numerical technique using Monte Carlo methods to follow the dynamical evolution of a spherical star cluster much faster than the so-called $n$-body methods.
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Louis de Branges de Bourcia $($$\text {b. 1932}$$)$
French-American mathematician best known for proving the Bieberbach Conjecture in $1984$, now called de Branges's Theorem.
Claims to have proved several important conjectures in mathematics, including the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis.
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Nicolas Bourbaki $($$\text {established 1935}$$)$
Nicolas Bourbaki is the name given to a group of (mainly) French mathematicians whose aim was to present an account of the entirety of modern mathematics, with an emphasis on rigour and generality.
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Philippe G. Ciarlet $($$\text {b. 1938}$$)$
French mathematician known particularly for his work on mathematical analysis of the finite element method.
Also contributed to elasticity, to the theory of plates and shells, and differential geometry.
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Alain Ghouila-Houri $($$\text {1939}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$
French mathematician known for his work in graph theory.
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Pierre Antoine Grillet $($$\text {b. 1941}$$)$
French mathematician working in abstract algebra and category theory.
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Lucien Szpiro $($$\text {b. 1941}$$)$
French mathematician working in number theory, arithmetic algebraic geometry, and commutative algebra
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Haïm Brezis $($$\text {b. 1944}$$)$
French mathematician who works in functional analysis and partial differential equations.
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Guy Auliac $($$\text {1946}$ – $\text {2003}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in education.
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Jean Brette $($$\text {1946}$ – $\text {2017}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in education.
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Michel Waldschmidt $($$\text {b. 1946}$$)$
French mathematician, specializing in number theory, especially transcendental numbers.
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Jean-Marc Deshouillers $($$\text {b. 1946}$$)$
French mathematician specializing in analytic number theory.
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Michel Criton $($$\text {b. 1947}$$)$
French mathematician who has written a number of books on recreational mathematics.
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Alain Connes $($$\text {b. 1947}$$)$
French mathematician and theoretical physicist, known for his contributions to the study of operator algebras and noncommutative geometry.
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Henri Cohen $($$\text {b. 1947}$$)$
French mathematician interested in number theory.
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Hervé Moulin $($$\text {b. 1950}$$)$
French mathematician known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division.
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Jean Tirole $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
French professor of economics who focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology.
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Joseph Oesterlé $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
French mathematician working in number theory.
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Michèle Audin $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
French mathematician working in geometry.
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Jean-François Le Gall $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
French mathematician working in areas of probability theory such as Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses and their connections with partial differential equations, the Brownian snake, random trees, branching processes, stochastic coalescence and random planar maps.
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Olivier Ramaré $($$\text {b. 1965}$$)$
French mathematician working in number theory.
Known in particular for Ramaré's Theorem.
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Joel Armengaud $($$\text {b. 1967}$$)$
Frenchman who found the Mersenne prime $M_{1\ 398\ 269}$.
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Occitania
Joan Francés Fulcònis $($$\text {c. 1520}$ – $\text {?}$$)$
Mathematician from the area of southern France referred to informally nowadays as Occitania.
Notable for writing one of the earliest mathematics books printed in one of the Occitan dialects, a linguistic group which at the time was subject to political pressure.
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