Henri Lebesgue - Personal Life

Personal Life

Henry Lebesgue was born on 28 June 1875 in Beauvais, Oise. Lebesgue's father was a typesetter and his mother was a school teacher. His parents assembled at home a library that the young Henri was able to use. Unfortunately his father died of tuberculosis when Lebesgue was still very young and his mother had to support him by herself. As he showed a remarkable talent for mathematics in primary school, one of his instructors arranged for community support to continue his education at the Collège de Beauvais and then at Lycée Saint-Louis and Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

In 1894 Lebesgue was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure, where he continued to focus his energy on the study of mathematics, graduating in 1897. After graduation he remained at the École Normale Supérieure for two years, working in the library, where he became aware of the research on discontinuity done at that time by René-Louis Baire, a recent graduate of the school. At the same time he started his graduate studies at the Sorbonne, where he learned about Émile Borel's work on the incipient measure theory and Camille Jordan's work on the Jordan measure. In 1899 he moved to a teaching position at the Lycée Central in Nancy, while continuing work on his doctorate. In 1902 he earned his Ph.D. from the Sorbonne with the seminal thesis on "Integral, Length, Area", submitted with Borel, four years older, as advisor.

Lebesgue married the sister of one of his fellow students, and he and his wife had two children, Suzanne and Jacques.

After publishing his thesis, Lebesgue was offered in 1902 a position at the University of Rennes, lecturing there until 1906, when he moved to the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Poitiers. In 1910 Lebesgue moved to the Sorbonne as a maître de conférences, being promoted to professor starting with 1919. In 1921 he left the Sorbonne to become professor of mathematics at the Collège de France, where he lectured and did research for the rest of his life. In 1922 he was elected a member of the Académie française. Henri Lebesgue died on 26 July 1941 in Paris.