Édouard Le Roy

Édouard Le Roy (1870 to 1954) was a French mathematician and philosopher, born and died in Paris. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1892, took the agrégation in mathematics in 1895 and a doctorate in sciences in 1898, and in 1909 became professor of mathematics at the Lycée Saint-Louis. His early publications dealt with Newtonian potential theory, the integration of the heat equation and divergent series. From about that time he turned to philosophy and became a close disciple of Henri Bergson, whom he succeeded at the Collège de France in 1922 and at the Académie française in 1945. With Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem he defended a conventionalist view of the foundations of mathematics, and he carried that conventionalism into questions of religious dogma, which led the Holy See to place his writings on the Index.