French physicist, born at Nancy on the 29th of April 1854, and educated at the lycée in that town. As a boy he served in an ambulance corps during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and later passed with distinction through the École Polytechnique in mining, becoming a mining engineer, but soon abandoning practical work for teaching, first at Caen and later in the university of Paris. He won the King of Sweden’s open prize for a mathematical treatise in 1889, and in 1908 was elected to the Académie Française. He was a voluminous writer on his own special subjects. He died in Paris on the 17th of July 1912.
