Group theory in France (1870-1914)

par Salomé Chauvet

lundi 24 nov. 2025, 10:30 → 11:25 Europe/Paris

Fokko du Cloux (ICJ)

While the development of group theory up to 1870 and the French contributions on Lie groups have already been studied, the rest of the French contributions between 1870 and 1914 have not been the subject of a detailed historical study yet. However, the research on groups in France during this period is active, as I will show with a corpus of 200 French articles. I will then focus on the case of the research on finite groups and the work of the French mathematician Raymond Le Vavasseur by analysing one of his proofs. This will demonstrate that, despite studying the same topic, the practices of group theorists are numerous and not standardised.