Name Jean Chazy | ||
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Jean Francois Chazy (15 August 1882, Villefranche-sur-Saone – 9 March 1955, Paris) was a French mathematician and astronomer.
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Life
Chazy was the son of a small provincial manufacturer and studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure with completion of the agregation in 1905. He received his doctorate in 1910 with thesis Equations differentielles du troisieme ordre et d’ordre superieur dont l’integrale generale a ses points critiques fixes. In 1911 he was maitre de conferences for mechanics in Grenoble and then in Lille. In World War I he served in the artillery and became famous for accurately predicting the location of the German siege gun which bombarded Paris. After the war he was again professor in the Faculte des Sciences de Lille (which later became the Lille University of Science and Technology). Simultaneously he taught at the Institut industriel du Nord (Ecole Centrale de Lille). In 1923 he was maitre de conferences at the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures in Paris (as well as examiner at the Ecole polytechnique). In 1924 he became professor for mechanics and later for celestial mechanics at the Sorbonne, where he retired in 1953 as professor emeritus.
Work
He worked on celestial mechanics and especially on the three body problem and the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit. The problem of explaining Mercury's orbit was solved by Albert Einstein's general relativity theory.
Honors
In 1922 Chazy was awarded the Valz Prize from the French Academy of Sciences for his papers on the three-body problem. In 1937 he was elected to the Academie des Sciences in the Astronomie section. He was also a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Belgian Academy of Sciences. In 1934 he was president of the Societe Mathematique de France. Since 1952 he was an official member of the Bureau des Longitudes. He was made a commander of the Legion d'honneur.