Godeaux's obituary of Antoine Meyer

Lucien Godeaux wrote an obituary of Antoine Meyer for the Belgium Royal Academy of Sciences one hundred years after his death. It was published as: L Godeaux, Notice sur Antoine Meyer Membre de l'Académie, Notices biographiques pour 1956 (Académie Royale de Belgique, Brussels, 1956), 2-15. The original French text is available at

https://academieroyale.be/Academie/documents/MEYERAntoineARB_19568372.pdf

We give below an English translation of the Notice. The reader should consult our biography of Antoine Meyer for a discussion concerning the year of his birth.

Antoine Meyer's obituary, by Lucien Godeaux.

Antoine Meyer.
Born in Luxembourg, on 31 May 1803, died in Liège, on 29 April 1857.

Tradition has it that a notice on the life and works of a Member of the Academy should, after his death, be written by one of his colleagues and published in the Yearbook. However, this tradition is not always respected and each year, our Permanent Secretary takes care to send us the list of notices that remain to be written. Why was the notice on Antoine Meyer not written? We do not know. [A notice on Meyer was published by his colleague from the University of Liège, E Bède, in the Annales de l'Enseignement public, 1857, volume I, pp. 359-364. There is also a notice in the Liber Memorialis of the University of Liège, published in 1869 by A Leroy, col. 438-446. Finally, a notice on Meyer was published in the Biographie Nationale. volume XIV, 1897, by C Bergmans, col. 765-773.] Should it be written now?

Nearly a century after his death! The works he left behind are now outdated, but it is perhaps not without interest to see what the level of university studies was in our country a quarter of a century after its independence. On the other hand, Meyer at a certain moment performed an act that testifies to a great firmness of character; it is perhaps useful to recall this at a time when two long occupations of the country by a foreign army have somewhat lowered the moral level. These are the considerations that led us to write the notice on Antoine Meyer.
***
Antoine Meyer was born in Luxembourg on 31 May 1803. His father, a modest craftsman, was nevertheless able to send him to the Athénée in his hometown; his studies were brilliant. Meyer then came to enrol at the University of Liège, giving lessons for a living. He was also, at that time, responsible for drawing up the catalogue of science books in the University Library. He wrote a thesis, printed in Luxembourg in 1823, but did not present himself for the final examination for the Doctorate in Science at that time. He left for Paris, with the intention of following the courses of the famous mathematicians who taught there. There, he lived poorly, thanks to the earnings he earned from the most vulgar manual work, according to Le Roy.

In 1826, Meyer returned to his homeland and was appointed professor at the College of Echternach. He was to teach Latin, Greek, Dutch, German and mathematics (the College then had only two professors). In 1828, he was given the task of teaching mathematics at the Military School in Breda. The events of 1830 did not allow him to occupy this position for long. [The Belgium Revolution, August 1830-July 1831 saw Belgium gain independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands] In 1831, we find him professor at the College of Louvain and the following year, professor at the Gaggia Institute in Brussels. It was at this time that he was awarded a Doctorate in Physical and Mathematical Sciences by the University of Liège (16 June 1832).

In 1834, Meyer was appointed professor of mathematics at the École Militaire, which had just been organised. One might have thought that, occupying a stable position, he would be able to devote himself to his favourite science. Unfortunately, this was not the case. But let us give the floor to his colleague E Bède:

A condition had been imposed on his teaching, contrary to the first condition of good teaching, the freedom of the professor, by requiring that he follow a certain work in his lessons. The scholar, a father of a family, had yielded; but one day his proud intelligence revolted in the presence of the incapacity of this guide that had been imposed on him; and throwing away this obligatory book, he cried out that he could not teach such absurdities. The act was all the more serious because the author of this book existed and occupied a high position in a neighbouring country. M Meyer was required to apologise; he replied with his resignation, and when he was asked where he intended to go after having thus renounced his only means of existence: "under the blue sky," he said, "it will not be the first time."

Meyer had to wait until 1838 to find a position. He was then appointed professor of Mathematical Analysis at the University of Brussels and at the same time he obtained a job as a calculator at the Ministry of War. It was in this capacity that he took care of the triangulation of the country. In 1839, he opted for Belgian nationality.

Jean-François Lemaire (1797-1852), professor at the University of Liège, was admitted to emeritus status on 15 March 1847. The course of Mathematical Analysis thus became vacant. In 1849, Meyer succeeded Lemaire. According to his contemporaries, his appointment was an act of courage by the Minister of the Interior, Charles Rogier, who had Public Education in his responsibilities. It is known that in our country, until very recently, the Minister of Public Instruction could appoint the professors of the State Universities as he pleased. While some were primarily concerned with the scientific qualifications of candidates for a chair, others, unfortunately numerous, had quite different concerns. Meyer's independent character must have made him many enemies; he was portrayed to the Minister in the darkest colours by powerful people, but the latter stood firm. Not only was Meyer appointed, but he was directly promoted to full professor. His responsibilities included the Course in Differential and Integral Calculus, that of Higher Analysis and the Course in Calculus of Probabilities. The value of Meyer's teaching, attested by documents of the time, proves that the choice was judicious.

On December 16, 1946, Meyer was elected correspondent of the Academy.

A terrible attack of gout, a disease from which he had suffered for a long time, took Meyer away on 29 April 1857. At the University of Liège, he left only regrets.

The Library of the University of Liège preserves a beautiful portrait of Meyer, painted by one of his sons. It is the reproduction of this portrait that appears at the head of this notice. [We owe this reproduction to the kindness of Madame Gobeaux-Thonet, Chief Librarian of the University of Liège. We express our sincere thanks to her.]
***
Antoine Meyer's first publications concern elementary mathematics. He undertook the publication of a complete course on this subject, but only the volume devoted to arithmetic was published, the support on which the author was counting having failed him. Later, he published the lessons of rectilinear and spherical trigonometry that he gave at the war depot, on the orders of the officers who commanded this depot. These are presentations made conscientiously and with clarity.

As soon as he arrived in Liège, Meyer took care of the publication of his courses and of research of a higher order. His volume on the theory of definite integrals and that relating to the calculus of variations reproduce part of the course of higher analysis that he gave at the University of Liège. These are works written for students, the examples abound. They attest that the author was well aware of the issues addressed and that he knew how to present them clearly, but it is obviously necessary to take into account, from the point of view of rigour, the time in which they were written.

In his Elements of Goniometry, Meyer explains the properties of circular and hyperbolic functions by the inversion of integrals giving arcsin

x

and arcsinh

x

. He introduces new notations for these functions, notations that do not seem to have been used by other mathematicians.

The work he published in the Journal de Crelle shows what his concerns were in analysis: the representation of arbitrary functions.

It was mainly the calculus of probabilities that was the subject of Meyer's research. Here, for example, is one of the problems he treats under the name of the inverse theorem of Bernoulli's:

x

and

y

are the unknown probabilities of two contrary events A, B and if, after a very large number

m + n

of trials, event A occurs

m

times and event B,

n

times, the probability that

x

is between

\Large\frac{m}{m+n}\normalsize

\Large\frac{\gamma}{m+n}\normalsize

\Large\sqrt{\frac{2n^m}{m+n}}

and

\Large\frac{m}{m+n}\normalsize

\Large\frac{\gamma}{m+n}\normalsize

\Large\sqrt{\frac{2n^m}{m+n}}

P = \Large\frac{1}{\pi} \large \int _{0}^{\gamma} \normalsize e^{-t^{2}}dt

It seems that Meyer's work on the calculus of probabilities gave rise to some discussions within the Academy. We find in fact that in April 1856, he presented a work "Note on a new demonstration of Bernoulli's theorem in the case where simple probabilities are variable", which was submitted for examination to Brasseur and Schaar (Bulletin, p. 363). The following month, he presented a second work "On a new exposition of the theory of a posteriori probabilities", this time submitted for examination to Schaar, Liagre and Brasseur (Bulletin, p. 476). In June, Brasseur read his report on the first work and proposed its printing (Bulletin, pp. 754-756), but Schaar proposed on the contrary to postpone printing pending the report on the second memoir. From this point on, Meyer is no longer mentioned in the Bulletins, except in May 1857, when his death was announced. The second memoir was published in Liège in August 1857, shortly after the author's death, by F Folie. In the notice, he says that it is the work to which Meyer seemed to attribute the most importance and that he actively took care of its publication until the day when illness forced him to charge Folie with this task.

The manuscript of the course on Calculation of Probabilities taught by Meyer from 1849 to 1857 was given by his widow to F Folie with the mission of publishing it. The Royal Society of Sciences of Liège took charge of this publication, but it suffered some delay due to the Society's limited resources. The work appeared in 1874 and forms volume IV of the second series of the Memoirs of the Society. It contains a very complete exposition of what was known at the time about the calculus of probabilities and its various applications. It had a certain success abroad and was translated into German by E Czuber, professor at the Higher Technical School of Vienna. This translation was published by the Teubner bookshop, Leipzig, in 1879.
***
The memory of Antoine Meyer has remained very much alive in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The reason for this is that he was the first to write in the Luxembourgish dialect. While in Echternach, he published a small collection of poems and set out some principles for the spelling of the dialect. The success of this writing led him to publish a second collection of poems in 1832, followed much later, in 1853, by a collection of Luxembourgish fables and traditions. Finally, the following year, in a new writing, he tried to represent, by special signs, the pronunciation and proposed a complete system of spelling for the dialect that was dear to him.

Lucien Godeaux

Last Updated March 2025