Émile Léonard Mathieu

Émile Léonard Mathieu (1835 to 1890) was a French mathematician born in Metz, remembered above all for his discovery, in work published in 1860 and 1873, of five sporadic simple groups that now carry his name. He entered the École Polytechnique in 1854, took his doctorate in Paris in 1859 with a thesis on transitive functions, and in a paper of 1861 showed how multiply transitive permutation groups could be constructed, an algorithm that led him to the groups later written M12 and M24, which he exhibited in 1873. Repeatedly passed over for a Paris chair, he turned toward mathematical physics, taught at Besançon, and from 1873 held the chair of pure mathematics at Nancy until his death. He wrote a series of treatises on analytical dynamics, capillarity, potential theory, electrodynamics and elasticity, and his name is also attached to the Mathieu functions, which arise from the wave equation for an elliptical membrane.