René Gateaux

Life Early years Gateaux was born on at Vitry-le-François, Marne, 222 years after another mathematician, Abraham de Moivre, was born there (de Moivre, being of Huguenot ancestry, fled to London after the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685). His father had a small saddlery and upholstery business, Having helped defend Nancy in the Battle of Grand Couronné, his regiment was engaged in the Race to the Sea and sent to Artois. On the morning of 3 October 1914, Gateaux was killed by machine guns at the entrance to the village of Rouvroy, which his regiment was defending. In the confusion of battle, his body was not identified and was quickly interred. Several years later, his remains were exhumed and moved to Neuville-Saint-Vaast National Cemetery, where he was interred in Tomb 76.

Legacy In August 1915, Hadamard started the process of awarding Gateaux a Prix de L'Académie des Sciences posthumously. In a letter to Émile Picard, he wrote:

In 1916, Gateaux was awarded the Prix Francoeur. In 1918, Hadamard talked to Paul Lévy, who was responsible for a course on functional analysis at the Collège de France, about drafts Gateaux had left before his departure to the Front. He proposed that Lévy edit them for publication in the Bulletin de la Société Mathématique de France, in two parts. The most important discovery that Lévy found in Gateaux' papers was a draft theory for integrating functions in infinite dimensions. This work came to be of great importance to Lévy in writing his important work Leçons d'analyse fonctionnelle (1922). When Lévy was talking with the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1922, Wiener immediately saw that he could use Gateaux' definition to define his "differential space" and construct a measure of Brownian motion (later called a "Wiener measure"). In the foundation article that he published in 1923, Wiener paid homage to Gateaux and Lévy for producing les études les plus profondes sur l'intégration en dimension infinie ("The deepest studies on infinite-dimensional integration").

Publications