CERAMATHS - DMATHS seminar: presentation by Catherine Goldstein

The CERAMATHS mathematics department seminar will welcome Catherine Goldstein (CNRS Research Director, Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu-Paris-Gauche) at 2pm on Thursday May 16, 2024, for the following talk:

Chessboards, combinations and probabilities: the mathematical world of a 19th-century amateur

While mathematics was becoming professionalized at the end of the 19th century, between institutions of higher learning, learned societies and the first colloquia, it was at the same time attracting many amateurs. In particular, I'll be following Henri Delannoy (1833-1915), a former military intendant who, following in the footsteps of Édouard Lucas in particular, studied the movements of pieces on chessboards with a view to their application to combinatorics and probability. His research provides a unique opportunity to observe not only how mathematics is represented, but also how the mathematical community in France functioned in the early years of the 21st century, sometimes in conflict with one another.