REY PASTOR, JULIO

(b. Logrono, Spain, 16 August 1888; d. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 21 Febuary 1962)

mathematics.

Rey Pastor, a poet in his youth, studied science at the University of Zaragoza. In 1905 he published his first monograph, Sobre los números consecutivos cuya suma es a la vez cuadrado y cubo perfecto. Appointed professor of mathematical analysis at the University of Oviedo in 1911, Rey Pastor wrote the inaugural address for the academic year 1913–1914, Los mátematicos espaňoles del siglo XVI (enlarged and reprinted in 1925 and 1934). In this work he described the deplorable and, as a condequence, was accused of being unpatriotic. The following year he was professor at Madrid. A series of trips to Germany resulted in the monograph Estudio grométrico da la polaridad (Marid, 1912) and his Fundaméntos de la geometria proyectiva superor (Madrid, 1916). In the latter work Rey Pastor exponded the synthetic geometry of space in n dimensions, introducing concepts of great generality (for example, the definition of the curve) and developing them in all their consequences.

In 1915 Rey Pastor gave a seried of lectures at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona on conformal mapping, in which he expounded and developed the work of H.A. Schwqrz. Notes from those lectures by Esteban Terrades were published in Catalan. In 1917 Rey Pastor gave an extension course at the University of Buenos Aires and accepted a contract “to direct the advenced study of the exact sciences” in Argentina, spending half of the school year there and half in Spain.

Rey Pastor founded a mathematics laboratiry, the Seminario Matemático de Madrid (1916), and the Revista matemática hispanomericana (1919), and published the now-classic Elementos de análisis algebraico (Madrid, 1917), in which he introduced his own discoveries and innovations. Besides his mathematical work he studied the history of Spanish car tography, which led to publication of La cartografia mallorquina, written with E. Garcia Camarero (Madrid, 1960).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Juan José González Covarrubia, Julio Rey Pastor (Buenos Aires, 1964); and Esteban Terrades, “Julio Rey Pastor como hombre e investigador,” in Homenaje a Rey Pastor, I (Santa Fé, Argentina, 1945).

J. Vernet