François Français

Joseph François Français was a French mathematician who worked extensively on differential calculus and built on the earlier work of Jean-Robert Argand on complex numbers. He trained at a seminary, taught at Colmar College in 1791 and at Strasbourg College in 1792, and his career was interrupted by the turmoil that followed the French Revolution. He joined the republican side in the war in the Vendée in 1793, left the army in October to continue teaching, later served again, and in October 1797 became professor of mathematics at the École Centrale du Haut-Rhin at Colmar. In 1803 he moved to Mainz as a high school mathematics teacher and taught at the artillery school there. His 1795 dissertation on partial differential equations went unpublished, but Sylvestre François Lacroix used his papers after his death, and he corresponded with Legendre, Lagrange, Lacroix and Biot. His brother Jacques Frédéric Français published the treatise Recherches sur la poussée des terres in 1817.