Charles Riquier

Charles Edmond Alfred Riquier was a French mathematician, born in Amiens on 19 November 1853 and died in Caen on 17 January 1929. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1873, passed the agregation in mathematics in 1876, and taught at the lycees of Brest and Caen before joining the University of Caen in 1886, where he stayed until he retired as professor emeritus in 1924. His doctorate of 1886 extended Carl Neumann's method for problems on functions of real variables with zero Laplacian to higher-dimensional space, and was examined by Hermite, Darboux and Picard. He received the Poncelet Prize in 1910 and in 1920 was elected to the French Academy of Sciences as successor to Hieronymus Zeuthen. Riquier is counted among the greatest pioneers of differential algebra and of symbolic computation for systems of partial differential equations, alongside Maurice Janet, Joseph Miller Thomas, Joseph Fels Ritt and Ellis Kolchin.