Léon Motchane (19 June 1900 – 17 January 1990) was a French industrialist and mathematician and the founder of the

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, jus ...

Bures-sur-Yvette Bures-sur-Yvette (, literally ''Bures on Yvette'') is a commune in the Essonne department in Île-de-France in northern France. Geography Bures-sur-Yvette is located in the Vallée de Chevreuse on the river Yvette, along which the RER line&nb ...

Biography

Léon Motchane was of mixed Russian and Swiss parentage, of Jewish descent. He left

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...

after the Russian revolution in 1918, emigrated to Switzerland and then to

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

in 1924. Encouraged by the French mathematician

Paul Montel Paul Antoine Aristide Montel (29 April 1876 – 22 January 1975) was a French mathematician. He was born in Nice, France and died in Paris, France. He researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis. Montel was a student of Émile ...

, Motchane eventually received a doctorate in mathematics at age 54 under the direction of Gustave Choquet. In 1958

Cécile DeWitt-Morette Cécile Andrée Paule DeWitt-Morette (21 December 1922 – 8 May 2017) was a French mathematician and physicist. She founded a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps. For this and her publications, she was awarded the American Socie ...

invited Léon Motchane to see the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent schola ...

in the USA which inspired Léon Motchane to establish an institute dedicated to fundamental research in three areas: mathematics, theoretical physics, and the methodology of human sciences (the latter area never really took root at the IHÉS). By the moral support of the American physicist

Robert Oppenheimer J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist. A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is often ...

, President of the

IAS IAS may refer to: Science * Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States * Image Analysis & Stereology, the official journal of the International Society for Stereology & Image Analysis. * Iowa Archeological Society, Uni ...

at that time, and the financial support of several major private companies he managed to create the

in 1958. It moved to its present location in Bois-Marie in

in 1962. He attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in August 1966 held in Moscow and accepted Alexander Grothendieck's Fields Medal on his behalf as Grothendieck boycotted the Congress to protest over the treatment of the dissident writers. Motchane remained the IHÉS director from 1958 until he retired in 1971 when, the Dutch mathematician

Nicolaas Kuiper Nicolaas Hendrik Kuiper (; 28 June 1920 – 12 December 1994) was a Dutch mathematician, known for Kuiper's test and proving Kuiper's theorem. He also contributed to the Nash embedding theorem. Kuiper studied at University of Leiden in 1937-4 ...

, took over as the director of IHÉS. One of Motchane's sons, Didier, became a politician.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Motchane, Leon 1900 births 1990 deaths French physicists Russian Jews 20th-century French mathematicians Emigrants from the Russian Empire to France Russian people of Swiss descent 20th-century French physicists