René Nathan Risser (1869 in Thann, Haut-Rhin – 1958) was a French statistician, mathematician, actuary, artillery officer, government administrator, professor of actuarial science, and inventor. [1]
Thann is a commune in the northeastern French department of Haut-Rhin, in Grand Est. It is the sous-préfecture of the arrondissement of Thann-Guebwiller and part of the canton of Cernay. Its inhabitants are known as Thannois.
Risser graduated from the École polytechnique in 1892 and then graduated from the École d'application de l'artillerie et du génie (School of application of artillery and of engineering) in the Arrondissement of Fontainebleau. In 1898 he became an employee of the Statistique générale de la France (French Bureau of Statistics) upon recommendations from Emmanuel Carvallo and Arthur Fontaine. Upon the advice of Lucien March, Risser oriented his career toward actuarial science and in 1907 joined the government ministry of Travail et de la Prévoyance sociale (labor and social welfare). Initially he was the Insurance Supervisory Commissioner and then became Chief Actuary of the ministry and a member of the board of the Institut des actuaires français. One of his notable appointees was Anatole Weber. [1]
The arrondissement of Fontainebleau is an arrondissement of France in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region. Since the January 2017 reorganization of the arrondissements of Seine-et-Marne, it has 85 communes.
Emmanuel Carvallo was a French mathematician. He is notable for showing in 1897 that bicycles could be self-stable, for opposing wave models of X-rays in 1900, and for claiming in 1912 that Einstein's Theory of Relativity had been proven false.
Lucien March was a French demographer, statistician, and engineer.
Risser was mobilized as an artillery officer in 1914. During WW I, he developed firing tables for artillery and developed a method of artillery fire in mountainous terrain when he was part of a French detachment to the Italian army in 1918. [1] In 1925 he received from the University of Paris a doctorate in mathematics for his thesis on mechanics Essai sur la théorie des ondes par émersion. His thesis committee consisted of Gabriel Koenigs, Édouard Goursat, and Émile Borel. [2] In 1927 Risser was appointed a professor of actuarial science and insurance at the École polytechnique, a position which he held until his retirement in 1937. In 1938 he was made an honorary professor of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM). [1]
Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat was a French mathematician, now remembered principally as an expositor for his Cours d'analyse mathématique, which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. It set a standard for the high-level teaching of mathematical analysis, especially complex analysis. This text was reviewed by William Fogg Osgood for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. This led to its translation in English by Earle Raymond Hedrick published by Ginn and Company. Goursat also published texts on partial differential equations and hypergeometric series.
Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel was a French mathematician and politician. As a mathematician, he was known for his founding work in the areas of measure theory and probability.
The Conservatoire national des arts et métiers is a doctoral degree-granting higher education establishment and Grande école in engineering, operated by the French government, dedicated to providing education and conducting research for the promotion of science and industry. It has a large museum of inventions accessible to the public.
In 1911 Risser was awarded the prix Montyon in statistics. [3] He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1924 in Toronto, in 1928 in Bologna, and in 1932 in Zurich.
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
Édouard Benjamin Baillaud was a French astronomer.
Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his PhD thesis The Theory of Speculation.
Jean-Gaston Darboux FAS MIF FRS FRSE was a French mathematician.
Jacques Charles François Sturm ForMemRS was a French mathematician.
Arnaud Denjoy was a French mathematician.
Charles-Ange Laisant, French politician and mathematician, was born at Indre, near Nantes on 1 November 1841, and was educated at the École Polytechnique as a military engineer.
Paul Appell, also known as Paul Émile Appel, was a French mathematician and Rector of the University of Paris. The concept of Appell polynomials is named after him, as is rue Paul Appell in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and the minor planet 988 Appella.
Guillaume-Jules Hoüel was a French mathematician. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1843 and received his doctoral degree in 1855 from the Sorbonne. He was sought by Urbain Le Verrier at the Paris Observatory, but chose instead to return to Thaon to study there. In 1859 he began to teach at Bordeaux.
Colonel Charles Paul Narcisse Moreau was a French soldier and mathematician. He served in the artillery and as an officier of the French Legion of Honor. He introduced Moreau's necklace-counting function into mathematics, and achieved the worst result ever recorded in an international chess tournament.
Marie Georges Humbert was a French mathematician who worked on Kummer surfaces and the Appell–Humbert theorem and introduced Humbert surfaces. His son was the mathematician Pierre Humbert. He won the Poncelet Prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1891.
Charles-François-Maximilien Marie (1819–1891) was a French mathematician, historian of mathematics. He was the author of History of the Mathematics and Theory of the variable imaginary functions (1874), relating to the imaginary unit.
Jean François Chazy was a French mathematician and astronomer.
Jacques Charles Émile Jouguet was a French engineer and scientist, whose name is attached to the Chapman–Jouguet condition.
Léon Lecornu was a French engineer and physicist.
Léon César Autonne was a French engineer and mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential equations, and linear algebra.
Émile Victor Jamet was a French mathematician.
Robert Fernand Bernard, Viscount de Montessus de Ballore was a French mathematician, known for his work on continued fractions and Padé approximants.
Adolphe Buhl was a French mathematician and astronomer.
Marcel Bayard (1895-1956) was a French mathematician and telecommunications engineer. He made pioneering contributions to the telecommunications theory in the 1930s. As Chief Engineer of French Telecommunications after the World War II, he supervised and modernized the French Communications system.
