Adrien Douady
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Adrien Douady (25 September 1935 – 2 November 2006) was a French mathematician.
He was a student of Henri Cartan at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and initially worked in homological algebra. His thesis concerned deformations of complex analytic spaces. Subsequently, he became more interested in the work of Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia and made significant contributions to the fields of analytic geometry and dynamical systems. Together with his former student John H. Hubbard, he launched a new subject, and a new school, studying properties of iterated quadratic complex mappings. They made important mathematical contributions in this field of complex dynamics, including a study of the Mandelbrot set. One of their most important results is that the Mandelbrot set is connected. The Douady rabbit, a quadratic filled Julia set, is named after him.
He taught at the University of Nice and was a Professor at the University of Paris-Sud, Orsay.
He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1997, and was featured in the French animation project Dimensions.
He died after diving into the Mediterranean from a favourite spot near his vacation home in the Var.
[edit] External links
- http://picard.ups-tlse.fr/~cheritat/Adrien70/index.php
- Adrien Douady at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- http://www.math.iu-bremen.de/adrien with a guest book to share your memories
- Pictures with Adrien Douady
This article incorporates material from Adrien Douady on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the GFDL.
