Rolin Wavre
Rolin-Louis Wavre (born 25 March 1896, Neuchâtel – 9 December 1949, Geneva) was a Swiss mathematician.[1]
Wavre studied at the Sorbonne and received his Ph.D. in 1921 from the University of Geneva; there he became in 1922 a professor extraordinarius and in 1934 a professor ordinarius (as successor to Charles Cailler). Wavre did research on, among other subjects, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, in which he was an adherent of Brouwer's intuitionism. Independently of, and almost simultaneously with, Leon Lichtenstein, he dealt with equilibrium figures of a heterogeneous fluid mass, with a view to applications to planetary systems in astrophysics.
In 1932 in Zürich he was a Plenary Speaker at the ICM with talk L’aspect analytique du problème des figures planétaires. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1920 in Strasbourg, in 1928 in Bologna,[2] and in 1936 in Oslo. For the two years 1936 and 1937 he was the President of the Swiss Mathematical Society.
In adolescence, while attending Neuchâtel's gymnasium, he was a close friend of Jean Piaget (who became a famous psychologist) and Gustave Juvet (who became a prominent mathematician).[3]
Selected publications
- La logique amusante. Geneva: Editions du Mont-Blanc. 1946; 80 pages
- "Is there a crisis in mathematics?". American Mathematical Monthly. 41 (8): 488–499. 1934. doi:10.2307/2300414. JSTOR 2300414.
- L’imagination du réel, l’invention et la découverte dans la science des nombres. Neuchâtel: Baconnière. 1948; 132 pages
- Figures planétaires et géodésie. Gauthiers-Villars. 1932; with foreword by Jacques Hadamard; 194 pages
References
- ↑ Tiercy, G. (1950). "Rolin Wavre". Annales des l'Université de Lyon, Section A, Sciences de Mathématiques et Astronomie. 13: 5–6.
- ↑ Wavre, R. (1929). "Sur les figures d'équilibre d'une masse fluide hétérogène". Atti del Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici: Bologna del 3 al 10 de settembre di 1928: 303–308.
- ↑ Vidal, Fernando (1994). Piaget Before Piaget. p. 124.