Émile Léonard Mathieu was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. He is most famous for his work in group theory

Group theory

In mathematics and abstract algebra, group theory studies the algebraic structures known as groups.The concept of a group is central to abstract algebra: other well-known algebraic structures, such as rings, fields, and vector spaces can all be seen as groups endowed with additional operations and...

 and mathematical physics. He has given his name to the Mathieu function

Mathieu function

In mathematics, the Mathieu functions are certain special functions useful for treating a variety of problems in applied mathematics, including*vibrating elliptical drumheads,*quadrupoles mass filters and quadrupole ion traps for mass spectrometry...

s, Mathieu group

Mathieu group

In the mathematical field of group theory, the Mathieu groups, named after the French mathematician Émile Léonard Mathieu, are five finite simple groups he discovered and reported in papers in 1861 and 1873; these were the first sporadic simple groups discovered...

s and Mathieu transformation

Mathieu transformation

The Mathieu transformations make up a subgroup of canonical transformations preserving the differential form\sum_i p_i \delta q_i=\sum_i P_i \delta Q_i \,The transformation is named after the French mathematician Émile Léonard Mathieu.- Details :...

. He authored a treatise of mathematical physics in 6 volumes.
Volume 1 is an exposition of the techniques to solve the differential equations of mathematical physics,
and contains an account of the applications of Mathieu functions to electrostatics.
Volume 2 deals with capillarity. Volumes 3 and 4 with electrostatics

Electrostatics

Electrostatics is the branch of physics that deals with the phenomena and properties of stationary or slow-moving electric charges....

 and magnetostatics

Magnetostatics

Magnetostatics is the study of magnetic fields in systems where the currents are steady . It is the magnetic analogue of electrostatics, where the charges are stationary. The magnetization need not be static; the equations of magnetostatics can be used to predict fast magnetic switching events that...

.
Volume 5 deals with electrodynamics, and volume 6 with elasticity

Elasticity (physics)

In physics, elasticity is the physical property of a material that returns to its original shape after the stress that made it deform or distort is removed. The relative amount of deformation is called the strain....

. The asteroid

Asteroid

Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

 27947 Emilemathieu

27947 Emilemathieu

27947 Emilemathieu is a main-belt asteroid discovered on July 9, 1997 by P. G. Comba at Prescott.- External links :*...

was named in his honour.

Books by Émile Mathieu

• Traité de physique mathématique (6 vols.) (Gauthier-Villars, 1873-1890)
• Dynamique Analytique (Gauthier-Villars, 1878)

External links