Albert Ribaucour

Albert Ribaucour was a French civil engineer and mathematician, born in Lille on 28 November 1845 and died in Philippeville, Algeria, on 13 September 1893. He began his studies at the École Polytechnique in 1865 and moved in 1867 to the École des Ponts et Chaussées. As an engineer he worked at the naval base of Rochefort from 1870, then at Draguignan in 1873, at Aix-en-Provence in 1878 and in Algeria from 1886. Alongside this career he made contributions to differential geometry and to the theory of minimal surfaces. His published notes, many of them in the Comptes Rendus between 1870 and 1873, deal with the deformation of surfaces, the evolutes of surfaces, lines of curvature, cyclic systems and bundles of circles, and in 1880 he published a study of elassoids, the surfaces of zero mean curvature.