Samuel Lattès (21 February 1873 (

Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative c ...

) – 5 July 1918) 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, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. From 1892 to 1895 he studied at the

École Normale Superieure 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, Savo ...

. After this he was a teacher in Algiers,

Dijon Dijon (, , ) (dated) * it, Digione * la, Diviō or * lmo, Digion is the prefecture of the Côte-d'Or department and of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in northeastern France. the commune had a population of 156,920. The earl ...

and Nice. After a promotion to

Paris Paris () is the capital and 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), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

in 1906 he moved first to Montpellier in 1908 and then to

Besançon Besançon (, , , ; archaic german: Bisanz; la, Vesontio) is the prefecture of the department of Doubs in the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. The city is located in Eastern France, close to the Jura Mountains and the border with Switzerla ...

, before he took up a professorship at the

University of Toulouse The University of Toulouse (french: Université de Toulouse) was a university in the French city of Toulouse that was established by papal bull in 1229, making it one of the earliest universities to emerge in Europe. Suppressed during the Frenc ...

in 1911. He died of

typhus Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Common symptoms include fever, headache, and a rash. Typically these begin one to two weeks after exposure. ...

in 1918. Today Lattès is best known for his work on complex sets, particularly for examples of rational functions including the

Riemann sphere In mathematics, the Riemann sphere, named after Bernhard Riemann, is a model of the extended complex plane: the complex plane plus one point at infinity. This extended plane represents the extended complex numbers, that is, the complex number ...

in its

Julia set In the context of complex dynamics, a branch of mathematics, the Julia set and the Fatou set are two complementary sets (Julia "laces" and Fatou "dusts") defined from a function. Informally, the Fatou set of the function consists of values w ...

. Today these examples are described as Lattès maps or Lattès examples.Für eine moderne Darstellung der Lattèsschen Beispiele und neuere Ergebnisse dazu siehe:

John Milnor John Willard Milnor (born February 20, 1931) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook Un ...

, ''On Lattès maps''. In ''Dynamics on the Riemann sphere'', European Mathematical Society, Zürich, 2006, S. 9–43

Bibliography

* Adolphe Buhl: ''Éloge des Samuel Lattès''. Mémoires de l'Academie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres de Toulouse, Band 9, 1921, S. 1–13. * ; English translation:

References

1873 births 1918 deaths École Normale Supérieure alumni 20th-century French mathematicians Deaths from typhus French people of colonial Algeria {{France-mathematician-stub

See also

Bibliography

References