Person: Ferrand, Jacqueline
Jacqueline Ferrand was a French mathematician who worked on conformal representation theory, potential theory and Riemannian manifolds.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Jacqueline was born in Alès, which is in southern France about 70 km from the coast and about 40 km north of Nimes.
- Her parents were Auguste Ferrand and Jeanne Chambon.
- Jacqueline attended the lycée de Jeunes Filles in Nimes, a school which was founded in 1832 and celebrated its 50th anniversary during the time that she studied there.
- Ferrand performed outstandingly in all the subjects she took at the lycée but it was mathematics which was her greatest love and she received the first prize in a national competition in mathematics.
- Ferrand performed brilliantly at the École Normale Supérieure and she came first equal in the Agrégation de Mathematiques in 1939.
- The other candidate who came first equal with Ferrand was Roger Apéry.
- Those two were by Roger Apéry and Jacqueline Ferrand.
- After graduating, Ferrand was appointed to teach at the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles at Sèvres.
- However, we shall continue to refer to her as Ferrand in this biography.
- Returning to Ferrand's career, she was promoted to full professor at Caen in 1948 and, later in the same year, she was appointed to the chair of calculus and higher geometry at the University of Lille, filling the chair left vacant when Bertrand Gambier (1879-1954) retired.
- In 1954 Jacques Chapelon (1884-1973) retired from his positions in Paris which provided vacant positions for which Ferrand applied.
- While she was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Ferrand worked on ideas which she announced in Application of Hilbert Space Methods to Lie Groups Acting on a Differentiable Manifold (1957).
- On returning from Princeton, Ferrand took up her chair at the University of Paris, a position she continued to hold until she retired in 1984.
- Having produced these books intended for students, Ferrand then published Les fondements de la géométrie Ⓣ(The foundations of geometry) (1985) which was a text on the foundations of geometry intended for teachers of mathematics.
- We must not give the impression that after a brilliant start to her research career, Ferrand became more interested in teaching mathematics than in research.
- However, in 1969 Ferrand gave a complete proof of the conjecture in her paper Transformations conformes et quasiconformes des variétés riemanniennes; application à la démonstration d'une conjecture de A Lichnerowicz Ⓣ(Conformal and quasiconformal transformations of Riemannian manifolds; application to a conjecture of A Lichnerowicz).
- It is worth noting that these remarkable research contribution were done when Ferrand was approaching 80 years of age.
- Jacqueline Ferrand has undertaken some collaborations abroad, especially in Finland, where she enjoys high esteem.
Born 17 February 1918, Alès, France. Died 26 April 2014, Sceaux, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
