Francis Buekenhout (born 23 April 1937 in

Ixelles ( French, ) or (Dutch, ), is one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium. Located to the south-east of Brussels' city centre, it is geographically bisected by the City of Brussels. It is also bordered by the muni ...

near

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

) is a Belgian mathematician who introduced Buekenhout geometries and the concept of

quadratic set In mathematics, a quadratic set is a set of points in a projective space that bears the same essential incidence properties as a quadric (conic section in a projective plane, sphere or cone or hyperboloid in a projective space). Definition of a qu ...

Career

Buekenhout studied at the University of Brussels under

Jacques Tits Jacques Tits () (12 August 1930 – 5 December 2021) was a Belgian-born French mathematician who worked on group theory and incidence geometry. He introduced Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric. Life and ...

and Paul Libois. Together with his teacher Jacques Tits, he developed concepts with the diagram geometries, also called Buekenhout geometries or Buekenhout–Tits geometries. These largely disregard the concrete axiom systems of a projective or

affine geometry In mathematics, affine geometry is what remains of Euclidean geometry when ignoring (mathematicians often say "forgetting") the metric notions of distance and angle. As the notion of ''parallel lines'' is one of the main properties that is inde ...

and put these and many other incidence geometries into a common framework. He worked at the ULB from 1960 to 1969 as an assistant to Libois. He was then appointed as extraordinary professor 1969 to 1998, and as ordinary professor from 1977 until his retirement in 2002. He has been a member of the

Académie Royale des Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (French: ''Académie des sciences'') is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research. It was at the ...

, Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique since May 2002, and in 1982 he won the Prix François Deruyts of this academy. Buekenhout co-founded the Belgian Mathematics Olympics in 1976 and organized them from 1976 to 1987.

Notable student

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Buekenhout, Francis Belgian mathematicians 1937 births Living people