Scientific archives and rare books

The Émile Borel archive was found in 1988 by Jean Lefebvre, then Honorary Professor at the university of Paris-Sud, in the basement of the Institut Henri Poincaré, during renovation work on the Borel building. Denise Lardeux, then honorary head librarian at IHP, worked very patiently to classify, stamp and draw up a summary list of these precious archives, which were in a rather messy state. Hélène Nocton, then librarian at IHP, ensured the preservation of this priceless collection.
 
In 1998, IHP agreed to transfer this collection to the Archives de l'Académie des sciences, the inventory of which is available here.

André Bloch was born in the Doubs region of France, into a Jewish family. According to one of his teachers, Georges Valiron, André Bloch was in the same class as his younger brother Georges in October 1910. Valiron thought that Georges was more gifted than André, who finished last in the class due to a lack of preparation. Luckily, another of his teachers, Ernest Vessiot, gave him a make-up oral so that he wouldn't have to repeat the year. The exam convinced Vessiot, and André and his brother Georges entered the École Polytechnique in 1912. Both brothers served in the army during the First World War, which meant they only had time to study for one year at Polytechnique.
During the First World War, André was an artillery second lieutenant in Édouard de Castelnau's regiment in Nancy. He and his brother were also wounded during the war: André was wounded in front of a German guard post and Georges suffered a head wound that cost him an eye. Georges was discharged from service and returned to the École Polytechnique on 7 October 1917. André, however, was admitted for convalescence, but not released from his duties.
On 17 November 1917, André, who was on convalescence leave, killed his brother Georges, his aunt and his uncle. Mathematicians have given several reasons for Bloch's crime. According to Henri Baruk, Bloch himself had carried out a eugenic act in order to eliminate the branches of his family affected by mental illness. (Source: Wikipedia)

"As the French section of the International Mathematical Union did not follow up its project to publish the works of André Bloch, I thought it would be useful to keep the documents I had prepared for this publication and to deposit a copy at the École Polytechnique, the original file remaining at the Institut Henri Poincaré. Most of these documents were given to me by Henri Cartan; I have supplemented them with some information gathered during interviews I had with Professor Baruk, André Bloch's doctor in Saint Maurice, and with John Nicoletis, a classmate of André and Georges Bloch, now deceased." Jacqueline Ferrand, Honorary Professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University

• Preservation history: archives compiled by Jacqueline Ferrand and deposited in the library of the Institut Henri Poincaré probably in the early 1990s.

• Finding aid: available online on Calames

• Location: Salle Paul Belgodère

• Call number: 7HA

• Extent: 1 conservation box

• Inclusive dates: 1920-1987

Born August 7, 1889 in Sèvres (Hauts-de-Seine) and died October 4, 1969 in New York (United States of America). He is mainly known for his work in quantum mechanics and solid state physics. He has worked on wave theory and information theory.

He is the heir of a great line of scientists (his father and his grandfather occupied before him a professorship at the Collège de France), Léon Brillouin was the son of Marcel Brillouin, the grandson of Éleuthère Mascart and the great-grandson of Charles Briot.

Born December 19, 1854 in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle (Deux-Sèvres) and died June 16, 1948 in Paris. He is a French mathematician and physicist.

Henri Brocard (1845-1922) was a French mathematician born in the Meuse commune of Vignot. He was a member of the Polytechnique class of 1865-1867 and spent most of his military career in colonial Algeria. A hard worker, he contributed to various mathematical journals, in particular L'Intermédiaire des mathématiciens and Les Nouvelles Annales des Mathématiques. In addition to his work on the new geometry of the triangle, he worked on methodology in bibliography and wrote popular science works. He spent his last days in Bar-le-Duc, continuing to contribute to scientific journals.

• Preservation history: Henri Brocard's archives were recovered on his death by André Gérardin, a mathematician from Nancy. Friend and colleague of Paul Belgodère (librarian at the IHP), A. Gérardin worked with him after the Second World War as archivist for the Intermédiaire des Recherches mathématiques. P. Belgodère acquired the various archives held by A. Gérardin, as well as his personal archives, on a life annuity basis. Henri Brocard's archives were therefore probably transferred from A. Gérardin's private estate to the public estate of the IHP between 1945 and 1953.

• Finding aid: available online on Calames

• Location: Salle Paul Belgodère

• Call number: 4HA

• Extent: about 2m.l. - 26 conservation boxes

• Inclusive dates: 1862-1922

Born in 1942, Bernard Bru chose to study applied mathematics at the Faculté des Sciences in Paris and submitted a postgraduate thesis on invariance in structure recognition. It was this subject that led him, then assistant professor in the chair of probability, to be invited to Brown University in the United States, which had a dedicated laboratory.
Returning to Paris in 1968, he then spent two years in Constantine, Algeria, where he gave his first lectures on the history of science. In 1982, he wrote his doctoral thesis on ordered spaces of random variables. Sometimes in collaboration with his wife Marie-France née Dulac, Bernard Bru specialises in probabilities and more particularly their place in the history of science. He analyses, republishes and comments on the work of modern and contemporary mathematicians on this subject: Bernoulli, D'Alembert, Laplace, Condorcet, Cournot, Bienaymé, Borel, Fréchet, etc.
In 1983, together with Ernest Coumet and Marc Barbut, he founded the History of Probability Calculus and Statistics seminar at the EHESS. He also remains famous in the mathematical community for having opened and prepared the scientific publication with Marc Yor of the sealed envelope 11-668 sent in 1940 by Wolfgang Döblin to the Académie des Sciences, on the Kolmogoroff equation.

The archive holdings consists of documentation either generated by Bernard Bru's exchanges with the community of historians of mathematics and probabilists (correspondence, offprints), or compiled for his research and courses, notably from the collections of the Institut Henri Poincaré when it was partially transferred to the Jussieu mathematics library, classified by author and theme by Marie-France Bru ; handwritten working notes that complement these publications; as well as archives produced by the publication of Henri Lebesgue's letters, prepared with Pierre Dugac, and by seminars and study days in which he participated.

• Preservation history: donated by Bernard Bru in two instalments: on 28 June 28 2022, processed in 2023, then 21 November 2023, to be processed.

• Finding aid: available online on Calames

• Location: Salle Paul Belgodère

• Call number: 2HA

• Extent: 44 conservation boxes

• Inclusive dates: 1897-2019

Born June 24, 1879 and died February 16, 1953 Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle). He is a French mathematician specializing in number theory.

Member of the Société Mathématique de France, he has written numerous articles in L'Enseignement Mathematique, the Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques and several other French and international journals.

In 1949, Paul Belgodère (then head of IHP's library), acquired the significant library and archives of André Gérardin, accumulated in Nancy.

Born September 7, 1884 in Lyon and died March 17, 1955 in Paris. He was renowned for his work in the theory of functions of the complex variable and its applications to the theory of functional equations.

In 1938 he was president of the Société Mathématiques de France, and in 1948 he received the Poncelet Prize, after receiving the Francœur Prize in 1925.