Émile Alphonse Louis Merlin (12 October 1875 in
Mons
Mons (; German and nl, Bergen, ; Walloon and pcd, Mont) is a city and municipality of Wallonia, and the capital of the province of Hainaut, Belgium.
Mons was made into a fortified city by Count Baldwin IV of Hainaut in the 12th century. T ...
– 29 July 1938 in
Le Bourg d'Oisans
Le Bourg-d'Oisans () is a commune in the Isère department in southeastern France.
It is located in the Oisans region of the French Alps. Le Bourg-d'Oisans is located in the valley of the Romanche river, on the road from Grenoble to Brianço ...
) was a Belgian mathematician and astronomer.
Merlin attended the secondary school ''Athénée royal de Bruxelles''. He then studied at the University of Liège and the University of Ghent, where in 1900 he received his doctorate in mathematics. This was followed by a stay abroad between 1901–1903 in Paris at the Sorbonne, at the Collège de France and in Göttingen. In 1904 he became an assistant at the observatory in
Uccle. In 1909 he was promoted to astronomer adjoint. From 1912 he was a lecturer on astronomy and geodesy at the University of Ghent and in 1919 he became a full professor and director of the geographical station of the University of Ghent.
He was an alpinist and died in a mountain accident in the French Alps in Le Bourg d'Oisans.
[
Merlin was one of the editors for the French edition of Klein's encyclopedia.][ He was Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto 1924 (''Sur les lignes asymptotiques en géométrie infinitésimale'') and Oslo 1936 (''Sur certains mouvements des fluid parfaits'').
]
Selected publications
*with Paul Stroobant, Jules Delvosal, Hector Philippot, and Eugène Delporte:
*
*
*
*
*
References
External links
"Emile Merlin (1875–1938)" by Henri Louis Vanderlinden
(obituary in Flemish with bibliography of Merlin's publications)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Merlin, Emile
20th-century Belgian mathematicians
20th-century Belgian astronomers
1875 births
1938 deaths