André-Louis Cholesky

André-Louis Cholesky was a French military officer, geodesist and mathematician, born in Montguyon in 1875. He attended the lycée in Bordeaux, entered the École Polytechnique, and worked in geodesy and cartography, taking part in the surveying of Crete in 1907 and 1908 and of North Africa before World War I. He is primarily remembered for the matrix decomposition named after him, which he used in his surveying work to solve the normal equations arising in least squares problems, needing fewer arithmetic operations than standard Gaussian elimination. He served in the French military as an artillery officer and was killed in battle a few months before the end of the war, and his discovery was published posthumously by his fellow officer Commandant Benoît in the Bulletin Géodésique.