Gabriel Koenigs was appointed lecturer in mechanics at Bresancon, then in analysis at Toulouse. He returned to École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1886 where he had obtained a doctorate 4 years earlier. He became professor of mechanics at the Sorbonne in 1897.
Koenigs was greatly influenced by Darboux and his first work was on geometry following work of Plücker and Klein. Then he looked at iteration theory and analytic mechanics where he applied Poincaré's theory.
In [3] his work on roulettes is discussed and put into context relating it to the work of several other mathematicians:-
The construction of centers of curvature of plane roulettes by Bobillier (1831), Gilbert (1858) and Koenigs (1897) was based on the theory of centroids by M Chasles (1830). This problem has kinematical origins (a roulette is the plane curve described by points of a plane figure moving in its plane) but each plane curve may be considered as a roulette.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
February 1997