4-33. Édouard Goursat

Édouard Goursat (1858–1936) was born in Lanzac (Lot), and following one year in mathématiques spéciales at the Lycée Henri IV (Paris), he was admitted to the École normale supérieure in 1876. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis “Sur l’équation différentielle linéaire qui admet pour intégrale la série hypergéométrique” (Goursat, 1881), which Thomas Craig subsequently translated to English and published in his own Treatise on Linear Differential Equations (Craig, 1889).

Only one letter has been located from Goursat to Poincaré, from 1882, concerning their respective studies of lacunary spaces (§ 4-31-1).

Goursat obtained the agrégation in mathematics in 1879, and was then named Maître de conférences at the Paris Faculty of Sciences. Two years later, just after obtaining his Ph.D. thesis, Goursat was named chargé de cours in analysis at the Toulouse Faculty of Sciences. In 1885, he was named Maître de conférences in descriptive geometry and analysis at the École normale supérieure, where he remained until 1897, when named to the chair in analysis at the Paris Faculty of Sciences. He switched to a chair in higher analysis and higher algebra in 1931, and held this chair until his retirement in 1933 (Charle and Telkes, 1989, 137). In 1919, he was elected to the Paris Academy of Sciences, in the geometry section (Institut de France, 1968, 239). On Goursat’s career and contributions to mathematics see his Notice (Goursat, 1900, 1918), the DSB entry by Tropp (1972) and MacTutor.

Time-stamp: "21.10.2026 13:22"