'Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel' (
January 7,
1871 –
February 3,
1956) was a
French mathematician and
politician.
Borel was born in
Saint-Affrique, France. Along with
René-Louis Baire and
Henri Lebesgue, he was among the pioneers of
measure theory and its application to
probability theory. The concept of a
Borel set is named in his honor. One of his books on probability introduced the amusing
thought experiment that entered popular culture under the name
infinite monkey theorem or the like. He also published a number of research papers on
game theory.
In 1913 and 1914 he bridged the gap between
hyperbolic geometry and
special relativity with expository work.
In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s he was active in politics. From 1924 to 1936, he was a member of the
French National Assembly. In 1925, he was
Minister of Marine. During the
Second World War he was a member of the
French Resistance. He died in
Paris.
Besides a
crater on the
Moon, the following entities are named after him:
★
Borel algebra,
★
Borel's lemma,
★
Borel measure,
★
Borel's paradox,
★
Borel space,
★
Borel-Cantelli lemma,
★
Borel-Carathéodory theorem,
★
Heine-Borel theorem,
★
Borel summation.
★
Centre Émile Borel at the
Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris
External links
★
★
Émile Borel in the
Mathematics Genealogy Project