Léon César Autonne (28 July 1859,
Odessa – 12 January 1916[1]) was a French engineer and mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential equations, and linear algebra.
Education and career
Autonne studied from 1878 to 1880 at l'
École polytechnique and then at the
École des ponts et chaussées and became there Ingénieur en chef. He received in 1882 from the
Sorbonne his Ph.D. with dissertation Recherches sur les intégrales algébriques des équations differentielles à coefficients rationnels,[2] with
Charles Hermite as chair of the thesis committee. The dissertation was based on research initiated by
Camille Jordan.
An 1891 article by Autonne in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris is one of the earliest uses of the concept of
Lie groups (as groups of Monsieur Lie).[3][4]
Henri Poincaré: La correspondance d'Henri Poincaré avec des mathématiciens de A à H, Cahiers du séminaire d'histoire des mathématiques, tome 7, 1986, p. 80 (letters from Autonne from 1881 to 1884 on the theme of the dissertation by Autonne, which were not published elsewhere; the answering letters from Poincaré are not reproduced in this source),
numdam
Necrology (in French), Revue générale des sciences, 1918, p. 33, available online
[1].
Michel Dürr: "AUTONNE Léon", in Dominique Saint-Pierre (dir.), Dictionnaire historique des académiciens de Lyon 1700-2016, Lyon : Éditions de l'Académie (4, avenue Adolphe Max, 69005 Lyon), 2017, p. 80-81.