| Eugène Charles Catalan | |
| Birth Date: | 1814 5, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Bruges, Belgium |
| Death Place: | Liège, Belgium |
| Nationality: | French, Belgian |
| Fields: | Mathematics |
| Alma Mater: | École Polytechnique |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Joseph Liouville |
| Doctoral Students: | François Deruyts Charles Hermite Constantin Le Paige |
| Notable Students: | Ernesto Cesàro |
| Known For: | Catalan numbers Catalan solid Catalan surface Catalan's conjecture Catalan's constant Catalan's identity Catalan's minimal surface |
Eugène Charles Catalan (in French pronounced as /øʒɛn ʃaʁl katalɑ̃/; 30 May 1814 – 14 February 1894)[1] was a French and Belgian mathematician who worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics. His notable contributions included discovering a periodic minimal surface in the space
R3
Catalan was born in Bruges (now in Belgium, then under Dutch rule even though the Kingdom of the Netherlands had not yet been formally instituted), the only child of a French jeweller by the name of Joseph Catalan, in 1814. In 1825, he traveled to Paris and learned mathematics at École Polytechnique, where he met Joseph Liouville (1833). In December 1834 he was expelled along with most of the students in his year as part of a crackdown by the July Monarchy against republican tendencies among the students. He resumed his studies in January 1835, graduated that summer, and went on to teach at Châlons-sur-Marne. Catalan came back to the École Polytechnique, and, with the help of Liouville, obtained his degree in mathematics in 1841. He went on to Charlemagne College to teach descriptive geometry. Though he was politically active and strongly left-wing, leading him to participate in the 1848 Revolution, he had an animated career and also sat in the France's Chamber of Deputies. Later, in 1849, Catalan was visited at his home by the French Police, searching for illicit teaching material; however, none was found.
The University of Liège appointed him chair of analysis in 1865. In 1879, still in Belgium, he became journal editor where he published as a foot note Paul-Jean Busschop's theory after refusing it in 1873 - letting Busschop know that it was too empirical. In 1883, he worked for the Belgian Academy of Science in the field of number theory. He died in Liège, Belgium where he had received a chair.
He worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics. He gave his name to a unique surface (periodic minimal surface in the space
R3