Gustave Malécot (28 December 1911 – November 1998) was a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

whose work on

heredity Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic infor ...

had a strong influence on

population genetics Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations, and is a part of evolutionary biology. Studies in this branch of biology examine such phenomena as Adaptation (biology), adaptation, s ...

Biography

Malécot grew up in L'Horme, a small village near St. Étienne in the

Loire The Loire ( , , ; ; ; ; ) is the longest river in France and the 171st longest in the world. With a length of , it drains , more than a fifth of France's land, while its average discharge is only half that of the Rhône. It rises in the so ...

département In the administrative divisions of France, the department (, ) is one of the three levels of government under the national level (" territorial collectivities"), between the administrative regions and the communes. There are a total of 101 ...

, the son of a mining engineer. In 1935, Malécot obtained a degree in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

from the

École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. He then went on to do a PhD under George Darmois and completed that in 1939. His work focused on R.A. Fisher's 1918 article ''

The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance "The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance" is a scientific paper by Ronald Fisher which was published in the ''Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh'' in 1918, (volume 52, pages 399–433). In it, ...

''. Between 1940 and 1942, with France under

Nazi German Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictat ...

occupation, Malécot taught mathematics at the Lyceé de Saint-Étienne. In 1942 he was appointed maître de conférence (lecturer) Université de Montpellier. In 1945 he joined the Université de Lyon, becoming professor of

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematics, mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and Industrial sector, industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a ...

in 1946, a position he held until his retirement in 1981. Malécot's Coancestry Coefficient, a measure of genetic similarity, still bears his name.

Bibliography

* Gustave Malécot, The mathematics of heredity, Freeman & Co 1969, (translated from the French edition, 1948)

References

* Epperson, Bryan K. (1999). Gustave Malécot, 1911–1998: Population Genetics Founding Father. ''Genetics'' 152, 477-484
link to article
* Nagylaki, Thomas (1989). Gustave Malécot and the transition from classical to modern population genetics. ''Genetics'' 122, 253–268
link to article
* Slatkin, Montgomery & Veuille, Michel (Eds.) (2002). ''Modern developments in theoretical population genetics: the legacy of Gustave Malécot''. Oxford : Oxford University Press. .

External links

L’œuvre scientifique de Gustave Malécot, 1911-1998 (pdf, in French)
Population geneticists 20th-century French mathematicians Evolutionary biologists 1911 births 1998 deaths École Normale Supérieure alumni 20th-century French biologists {{France-biologist-stub