Biography:Jean-Louis Nicolas

From HandWiki
Short description: French mathematician

Jean-Louis Nicolas is a French number theorist.

He is the namesake (with Paul Erdős) of the Erdős–Nicolas numbers,[1][2] and was a frequent co-author of Erdős,[3] who would take over the desk of Nicolas' wife Anne-Marie (also a mathematician) whenever he would visit.[4] Nicolas is also known for his research on partitions,[4] and for his unusual proof that there exist infinitely many n for which

[math]\displaystyle{ \varphi(n) \lt e^{-\gamma}\frac {n} {\log \log n} }[/math]

where [math]\displaystyle{ \varphi(n) }[/math] is Euler's totient function and γ is Euler's constant: he proved this bound unconditionally by providing two different proofs, one in the case that the Riemann hypothesis holds and another in the case that it fails.[5]

Nicolas earned his Ph.D. in 1968 as a student of Charles Pisot.[6] He works at Claude Bernard University Lyon 1.[7]

A conference in honor of Nicolas' 60th birthday was held on January 14–19, 2002 at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques in Marseille. The proceedings of the conference were published as a festschrift in The Ramanujan Journal.[8]

References

  1. De Koninck, Jean-Marie (2009), Those Fascinating Numbers, p. 141, ISBN 978-0-8218-4807-4 
  2. "Répartition des nombres superabondants", Bull. Soc. Math. France 79 (103): 65–90, 1975, doi:10.24033/bsmf.1793, http://archive.numdam.org/article/BSMF_1975__103__65_0.pdf 
  3. List of collaborators of Erdős by number of joint papers , from the Erdős number project web site.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Sárközy, A. (2005), "Jean-Louis Nicolas and the partitions", The Ramanujan Journal 9 (1–2): 7–17, doi:10.1007/s11139-005-0820-x .
  5. The New Book of Prime Number Records, New York: Springer, 1996, p. 320, ISBN 0-387-94457-5 .
  6. Jean-Louis Nicolas at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. Jean-Louis Nicolas, Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, retrieved 2015-01-13.
  8. "Preface", The Ramanujan Journal 9 (1–2): 5, 2005, doi:10.1007/s11139-005-0819-3 .