Person: Franel, Jérôme

Jérôme Franel was a Swiss mathematician who specialised in analytic number theory.

Franel co-supervised (at least) four PhD students, three jointly with Hurwitz and one with Hermann Weyl.
Franel served as the Polytechnic's Director from 1905-1909.
On several occasions Franel acted as intermediary between the Polytechnic and secondary schools or the Gesellschaft ehemaliger Polytechniker.
As Director, Franel was heavily involved in organising the celebrations.
Franel was first and foremost a teacher and not a researcher.
Franel wrote a couple of papers on problems in geometry, but then turned to analysis and number theory.
Franel also regularly contributed to the French journal L'Intermédiaire des mathématiciens.
The German mathematician Edmund Landau, who held a professorship at the University of Göttingen at the time, then wrote a few papers on the same topic based on and expanding Franel's ideas.
Franel joined the organising committee of the first International Congress of Mathematicians in July 1896, where he was responsible for the French translations.
Franel did not give a talk himself, but he read out Poincaré's talk in the first general meeting, which he is remembered for.
Despite having been general secretary, Franel never had the chance to edit the congress proceedings in French.
Franel was a member of the organising committee of the 1932 ICM in Zürich again, but did not give a talk at the congress.

Born 29 November 1859, Travers, Neuchâtel canton, Switzerland. Died 21 November 1939, Zürich, Switzerland.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin Switzerland

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

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