André Bloch

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André Bloch attended the École Polytechnique in 1913 then was drafted in 1914. An accident at the front made him unfit for military service. On 17 Nov 1917, at a family meal, he murdered one of his brothers, his uncle and his aunt. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital (Saint-Maurice Hospital) where he worked on a large range of topics, function theory, geometry, number theory, algebraic equations and kinematics.

Bloch wrote many important papers, corresponding with Hadamard, Mittag-Leffler, Pólya and Henri Cartan (Elie Cartan's son). He was a model patient who refused to go out saying Mathematics is enough for me. Bloch explained the murders to his doctor saying It's a matter of mathematical logic. There had been mental illness in my family. He saw it as his eugenic duty! The Académie awarded him the Becquerel Prize just before his death.

Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

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JOC/EFR © December 1996 Copyright information	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
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