Victor-Amédée Lebesgue

Victor-Amédée Lebesgue, also written Le Besgue, was a French mathematician who worked on number theory. Born at Grandvilliers in the Oise department in 1791, he studied in Amiens and Paris, took a bachelor of science degree in 1813 and then made his living as a schoolmaster and private tutor, spending time in London and in Russia, where he wrote his first papers on congruences of arbitrary degree in one unknown, published in the Bulletin du Nord in 1829. After returning to France in 1830 he taught in several colleges and went on to the Sorbonne, and he was later elected a member of the Académie des sciences in 1847. His books include an Introduction à la théorie des nombres (1862), Exercices d'analyse numérique and tables for factoring numbers into primes, and later writers link his name with work on Catalan's conjecture, on proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem for particular exponents and on Lebesgue-Nagell type equations. He died in Bordeaux in 1875. He should not be confused with Henri Lebesgue, the founder of modern measure theory.