Jean Gaston Darboux
Born: 14 Aug 1842 in Nimes, Gard, Languedoc, France
Died: 23 Feb 1917 in Paris, France
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Gaston Darboux made important contributions to differential geometry and analysis.
Darboux held appointments at the Collège de France (1866-1867), Lycée Louis le Grand (where Galois was educated) (1867-1872), École Normale Supérieure (1872-1873) and the Sorbonne (1873-1890).
He made important contributions to differential geometry and analysis and the Darboux integral is named after him. This integral was introduced in a paper on differential equations of the second order which he wrote in 1870.
In 1875 he gave his way of looking at the Riemann integral, defining upper and lower sums and defining a function to be integrable if the difference between the upper and lower sums tends to zero as the mesh size gets smaller.
In 1873 he wrote a paper on cyclides and between 1887 and 1896 he produced four volumes on infinitesimal geometry which included most of his earlier work it was titled Lecons sur la théorie général des surfaces et les applications géométriques du calcul infinitésimal.
Darboux also studied the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a surface. Work in this area was also done at around the same time by Zermelo and by Kneser.
He is renowned as an exceptional teacher and administrator as well as being an excellent research worker.
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