Henri Padé
Encyclopedia
Henri Eugène Padé was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

, who is now remembered mainly for his development of approximation
Approximation
An approximation is a representation of something that is not exact, but still close enough to be useful. Although approximation is most often applied to numbers, it is also frequently applied to such things as mathematical functions, shapes, and physical laws.Approximations may be used because...

 techniques for functions using rational function
Rational function
In mathematics, a rational function is any function which can be written as the ratio of two polynomial functions. Neither the coefficients of the polynomials nor the values taken by the function are necessarily rational.-Definitions:...

s.

He was educated at École Normale Supérieure
École Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...

 in Paris. He then spent a year at Leipzig and Göttingen.

Back in France in 1890, he taught in Lille
Lille
Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...

, while preparing his doctorate under Charles Hermite
Charles Hermite
Charles Hermite was a French mathematician who did research on number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra....

. His doctoral thesis disclosed the now-known Padé approximant
Padé approximant
Padé approximant is the "best" approximation of a function by a rational function of given order - under this technique, the approximant's power series agrees with the power series of the function it is approximating....

. He proceeded as assistant professor in Université Lille Nord de France
Université Lille Nord de France
The University of Lille -Nord de France , located in Lille, France, is a center for higher education, academic research and doctoral studies located over multiple campuses in the Academie de Lille....

, where he succeeded Émile Borel
Émile Borel
Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel was a French mathematician and politician.Borel was born in Saint-Affrique, Aveyron. Along with René-Louis Baire and Henri Lebesgue, he was among the pioneers of measure theory and its application to probability theory. The concept of a Borel set is named in his...

 as a professor of rational mechanics at École centrale de Lille
École Centrale de Lille
Located in the campus of the University of Lille in France, École Centrale de Lille is a renowned Graduate Engineering school, with roots back to 1854 as the École des arts industriels et des mines de Lille, re-organised in 1872 as Institut industriel du Nord.It is one of the Centrale Graduate...

 until 1902.

He then moved to Université de Poitiers in 1902; he became recteur of Académie de Besançon and Dijon in 1923. He retired as Recteur of Académie de Aix-Marseilles in 1934.

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