HADAMARD, JACQUES SALOMON

HADAMARD, JACQUES SALOMON (1865–1963), French mathematician. Born in Versailles, Hadamard held chairs of mathematics at the Collège de France from 1897 and the Ecole Polytechnique from 1912 until his retirement in 1935. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1912 and was the first to be awarded the Feltrinelli Prize founded by the Italians in 1955 to compensate for the absence of a Nobel Prize for mathematicians. A brother-in-law of Alfred *Dreyfus, Hadamard took an active interest in the Dreyfus case, and for 60 years was a member of the central committee of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme founded at the time of the Zola trial in 1898. The dangers of Hitlerism were recognized by Hadamard at an early stage. He was a free-thinker, but worked to alleviate the plight of German Jewry. He was a member of the French Palestine Committee and of the administrative board of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He escaped from France in 1941 to the United States, and moved to England to engage in operational research with the Royal Air Force. Hadamard produced important work in analysis, number theory, differential geometry, calculus of variations, functional analysis, partial differential equations, and hydrodynamics, and inspired research among successive generations of mathematicians. He published numerous papers and books. His An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945; Essai sur la psychologie de l'invention dans le domaine mathématique, 1959) was published many years after his retirement.

bibliography:

Mandelbrojt and Schwartz, in: Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 71 (1965), 107–29; Cartwright, in: Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 40 (1965), 722–48.

[Barry Spain]