Lucien Alexandre Charles René de Possel (7 February 1905 – 1974) was a French
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, one of the founders of the
Bourbaki group, and later a pioneer
computer scientist, working in particular on
optical character recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...
.
Life
Possel was born in
Marseille
Marseille ( , , ; also spelled in English as Marseilles; oc, Marselha ) is the prefecture of the French department of Bouches-du-Rhône and capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. Situated in the camargue region of southern Fra ...
. He had the conventional background for a member of Bourbaki: the
École Normale Supérieure
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* École, S ...
,
agrégation, and then study in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
. He left Bourbaki at an early stage: there was an obvious personal matter intruding between him and
André Weil who had married De Possel's ex-wife Eveline following her divorce from De Possel in 1937.
[
]
Work
De Possel published an early book on
game theory in 1936 (''Sur la théorie mathématique des jeux de hasard et de réflexion''). His later research work in computer science at the
Institut Blaise Pascal was in a position of relative isolation, as the subject strove for independence and to move away from the imposed role of service provider in the field of
numerical analysis
Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms that use numerical approximation (as opposed to symbolic manipulations) for the problems of mathematical analysis (as distinguished from discrete mathematics). It is the study of numerical methods ...
. He became director there in 1960, in succession to
Louis Couffignal
Louis Pierre Couffignal (16 March 1902 – 4 July 1966) was a French mathematician and cybernetics pioneer, born in Monflanquin. He taught in schools in the southwest of Brittany, then at the naval academy and, eventually, at the Buffon School.
...
(1902–1966), until an administrative reorganisation under the
C. N. R. S. in 1969. He was a leading figure in pushing for the later
Institut de Programmation. He died in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
.
References
External links
Biography(including 4 pictures) on St-Andrews site.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Possel, Rene De
Nicolas Bourbaki
École Normale Supérieure alumni
1905 births
1974 deaths
20th-century French mathematicians