Edmond Bour

Jacques Edmond Emile Bour (1832 to 1866) was a French engineer and mathematician remembered for the Bour formula, also called the transport theorem. He was a student at the Ecole Polytechnique, graduating at the top of his class in 1852, taught for a year at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, and then became a professor of engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique. In 1858 he won the grand prize in mathematics of the Academie des Sciences for his treatise on the integration of partial differential equations of the first and second degree. Most of his work concerned the deformation of surfaces, and in 1862 he introduced the sine-Gordon equation. He died young, in March 1866, after journeys to Algeria to observe the eclipse of 1860 and to Asia Minor for metallurgical explorations.