Désiré André

Désiré André, whose full name was André Antoine Désiré, was a French mathematician, born in Lyon on March 29, 1840, best known for his work on Catalan numbers and alternating permutations. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1860, passed the Agrégation in Mathematics in 1863 and defended his doctoral thesis on 25 March 1877, as a student of Charles Hermite and Joseph Bertrand. He became professor of mathematics at Collège Stanislas de Paris, where he taught from 1885 to 1900, was treasurer of the Société Mathématique de France from 1873 to 1876 and later its chairman, and wrote a 1909 book on notation in elementary mathematics, Des notations mathématiques. He died in Paris on September 12, 1917.