Emile Borel

Émile Borel (1871 to 1956) was a French mathematician and politician, born in Saint-Affrique in the Aveyron, the son of a Protestant pastor. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1889, placed first in the agrégation in 1892 and published his thesis on the theory of functions in 1893. After four years as a lecturer at the University of Lille he returned to the École Normale Supérieure in 1897 and held its chair of the theory of functions until 1941. Borel is known for founding work in measure theory and probability: with René-Louis Baire and Henri Lebesgue he was among the pioneers of measure theory and of its application to probability, and the Borel set is named in his honor. The MacTutor biography credits him with the first effective theory of the measure of sets of points and with the start of the modern theory of functions of a real variable, and notes that the covering theorem now usually called the Heine-Borel theorem was first stated and proved explicitly in his first major memoir of 1892. In 1922 he founded the Paris Institute of Statistics and in 1928 he co-founded the Institut Henri Poincaré, and he sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1924 to 1936.