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Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel (January 7, 1871 - February 3, 1956) was a French mathematician and politician.
Émile Borel was born in Saint-Affrique, France. Along with René-Louis Baire and Henri Lebesgue, he was among the pioneers of measure theory and its application to probability theory. The concept of a Borel set is named in his honor. One of his books on probability introduced the amusing thought experiment that entered popular culture under the name infinite monkey theorem or the like. He also published a number of research papers on game theory.
In 1913 and 1914 he bridged the gap between hyperbolic geometry and special relativity with expository work.
In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s he was active in politics: he was for many years member of the French parliament and navy secretary. During the Second World War he was a member of the French Resistance. He died in Paris.
Besides a crater on the Moon, the following entities are named for him:
- Borel algebra,
- Borel's lemma,
- Borel measure,
- Borel's paradox,
- Borel space,
- Borel-Cantelli lemma,
- Borel-Carathéodory theorem,
- Heine-Borel theorem.
External links
- MacTutor Borel biography (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Borel.html)de:Emile Borel