Paul Tannery
Encyclopedia
Paul Tannery 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
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 and historian of mathematics
History of mathematics
The area of study known as the history of mathematics is primarily an investigation into the origin of discoveries in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, an investigation into the mathematical methods and notation of the past....

. He was the older brother of mathematician Jules Tannery
Jules Tannery
Jules Tannery was a French mathematician who notably studied under Charles Hermite and was the PhD advisor of Jacques Hadamard....

, to whose Notions Mathématiques he contributed an historical chapter. Though Tannery's career was in the tobacco
Tobacco
Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...

 industry, he devoted his evenings and his life to the study of mathematicians and mathematical development.

Life and career

Tannery was born on December 20, 1843, to a deeply Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 family. He attended private school in Mantes, followed by the Lycées in Le Mans and Caen
Caen
Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....

. He then entered the École Polytechnique
École Polytechnique
The École Polytechnique is a state-run institution of higher education and research in Palaiseau, Essonne, France, near Paris. Polytechnique is renowned for its four year undergraduate/graduate Master's program...

, on whose entrance exam he excelled. His curriculum included mathematics, the sciences, and the classics, all of which would be represented in his future academic work. Tannery's life of public service began as he then entered the École d'Applications des Tabacs as an apprentice engineer.

As an assistant engineer, Tannery spent two years in the state tobacco factory at 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...

. In 1867, he moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

; three years later, he served as an artillery captain in the Franco-Prussian War
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...

. Biographies of Tannery describe him as an ardent patriot and claim that he never fully accepted the humiliating Treaty of Frankfurt
Treaty of Frankfurt (1871)
The Treaty of Frankfurt was a peace treaty signed in Frankfurt on 10 May 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.- Summary :The treaty did the following:...

.

After his graduation from the École Polytechnique, Tannery had become interested in Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...

 and his positivist
Positivism
Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....

 philosophy. After the war, his interest in mathematics continued, and Comte's ideas would influence his approach to the study of the history of science. Tannery moved several times with his career in the tobacco industry: to Périgord in 1872, to Bordeaux
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...

 in 1874, to Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...

 in 1877, and to Paris in 1883. Bordeaux had something of an intellectual atmosphere, and though Tannery moved to Le Havre (near his parents, who lived at Caen) at his own request, he would also directly request the move to Paris, where his research and academic pursuits would be able to flourish.

It was in Paris that Tannery took on his first two major editorial works. In 1883, he began an edition of Diophantus
Diophantus
Diophantus of Alexandria , sometimes called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of books called Arithmetica. These texts deal with solving algebraic equations, many of which are now lost...

's manuscripts, and in 1885, he and Charles Henry began an edition of one of Fermat
Pierre de Fermat
Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality...

's works. This work was made possible by access to the Bibliothèque Nationale, and so Tannery had to reduce his efforts in 1886 when he was transferred to Tonneins. Even without access to the Bibliothèque, Tannery remained hard at work, however, as he published two books composed of articles he had been writing for the Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger and for the Bulletin de sciences mathematiques.

In 1888, Tannery moved back to Bordeaux, where he studied Greek astronomy and directed the tobacco factory. Two years later, he was back in Paris; he would remain near Paris until his death. Despite a heavy professional workload, he continued to be productive in his work in the history of science. His editions of Diophantus and Fermat were published, along with over 250 articles. From 1890 forward, Tannery's other major work focused on a new edition of Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...

's works and correspondence, on which he collaborated with Charles Adam, an historian of modern philosophy.

Scandal arose in 1903 when the Collège de France
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...

 began a search for a new professor of the history of science. Tannery was considered something of a shoo-in; he even began writing his inaugural lecture instead. Instead, the position went to Grégoire Wyrouboff
Grigorii Nikolayevich Vyrubov
Grigorii Nikolayevich Vyrubov, or Grégoire Wyrouboff was a Russian Positivist philosopher and historian of science.Born in Moscow, Vyrubov was brought up in Italy and France before studying medicine and natural philosophy at the University of Moscow...

, who concentrated on modern mathematicians instead of Tannery's classical and seventeenth-century idols. Wyrouboff was also a freethinker, an asset to the secularist Third Republic
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the republican government of France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed due to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, to 1940, when France was overrun by Nazi Germany during World War II, resulting in the German and Italian occupations of France...

, while Tannery was Catholic.

Tannery died soon thereafter, on November 27, 1904, in Pantin, just outside Paris. His wife, Marie, would survive until 1945, and she published several of his works posthumously, helping to ensure that his legacy would live on.

External links

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