Speaker
Description
This talk aims at presenting some characteristics of Charles Hermite's style of writing. To be more precise, it focuses on Hermite's writing peculiarities which can be detected through the use of words which are not associated a priori with the mathematical lexicon: non-technical nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as well as functionals words such as conjunctions and pronouns. The analysis of all these words is quantitative and comparative, Hermite's corpus being contrasted with Camille Jordan's one. Among other results, I will show that Hermite's prose is characterized by a higher lexical diversity than Jordan's one, and that it corresponds to a lively mathematical narration where the first person and other words which describe the mathematical processes are of great importance.