Person: Richard, Louis

Louis Richard was a French mathematician who is best-known as the teacher of Evariste Galois.

Richard continued his friendship with Vincent after he left Douai.
These military connections must have been to Richard's liking.
In 1920 he went to Paris where he was appointed to teach mathematics at the Collège Saint-Louis.
Remaining in Paris, he then taught at the famous Collège Louis-le-Grand where he was given the chair of Special Mathematics in 1822.
Richard held this post for twenty-seven years until his death at the age of 53.
The Collège Louis-le-Grand was an ancient educational establishment founded in 1563.
Richard was an extremely talented teacher who was given the freedom to devise his own approach to getting the best educational results.
It is probably fair to say that Richard chose to give them to Hermite since in many ways he saw him as being similar to Galois.
Under Richard's guidance, Hermite read papers by Euler, Gauss and Lagrange rather than work for his formal examinations, and he published two mathematics papers while a student at Louis-le-Grand.
Despite being encouraged by his friends to publish books based on the material that he taught so successfully, Richard did not wish to do so and so published nothing.

Born 31 March 1795, Rennes, France. Died 11 March 1849, Paris, France.

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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive