Jérôme Franel

Jérôme Franel (1859–1939) was a Swiss mathematician who specialised in analytic number theory. He is mainly known through a 1924 paper, in which he establishes the equivalence of the Riemann hypothesis to a statement on the size of the discrepancy in the Farey sequences, and which is directly followed (in the same journal) by a development on the same subject by Edmund Landau.

Jérôme Franel was a citizen ("bourgeois") of Provence (Vaud, Switzerland). He was born on November 29, 1859 in Travers (Neuchâtel, Suisse), and died in Zürich on November 21, 1939.

George Pólya said that he was an especially attractive kind of person and a very good teacher, but that, since he spent most of his time teaching, and reading French literature (for which he had a passion), he had no time left for research. After his retirement he worked on the Riemann hypothesis.

Jerôme Franel spent his first years with his 12 brothers and sisters in Travers. He graduated with a sciences highschool diploma from the "Ecole industrielle" in Lausanne. He then studied at the Politechnikum in Zürich, and in Berlin where he attended courses given by Weierstrass, Kronecker and Kummer, and finally in Paris where he attended courses by Hermite. On September 15, 1883, he was awarded a science bachelor's degree ("licence") from the Paris Academy.

Franel taught then for two years at the "Ecole industrielle" in Lausanne. On April 1, 1886, then only 26 years old, he was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics in the French language at the Politechnikum in Zürich by the Federal Council of Switzerland.

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