Events from the year 1852 in France.
Events from the year 1908 in France.
André-Louis Cholesky (15 October 1875, Montguyon – 31 August 1918, Bagneux) was a French military officer and mathematician.
Cholesky was born in Montguyon, France. His paternal family was descendant from the Cholewski family who emigrated from Poland during the Great Emigration. He attended the Lycée in Bordeaux and entered the École Polytechnique, where Camille Jordan and Henri Becquerel taught. He worked in geodesy and map-making, and was involved in the surveying of Crete and North Africa before World War I. He is primarily remembered for the development of a matrix decomposition known as the Cholesky decomposition which he used in his surveying work.
He served in the French military as an artillery officer and was killed in battle a few months before the end of World War I; his discovery was published posthumously by his fellow officer Commandant Benoît in the Bulletin Géodésique.
The becquerel (English: ; symbol: Bq) is the SI derived unit of radioactivity. One becquerel is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. The becquerel is therefore equivalent to an inverse second, s−1. The becquerel is named after Henri Becquerel, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903 for their work in discovering radioactivity.
The Becquerel family is a family of French scientists.
Becquerelite is a uranium mineral with the chemical formula: Ca(UO2)6O4(OH)6·8(H2O). It is a secondary mineral which contains calcium and is a bright yellow colour. It has a Mohs hardness of about 2.
It was named after the French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852–1908), who discovered radioactivity in 1896. Becquerelite contains about 70% uranium by weight.
It is mainly mined in Kasolo of the former Zaire, in the present day Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Gaston Planté (22 April 1834 – 21 May 1889) was the French physicist who invented the lead–acid battery in 1859. The lead-acid battery eventually became the first rechargeable electric battery marketed for commercial use and is widely used in automobiles.
Planté was born on 22 April 1834 in Orthez, France. In 1854 he began work as an assistant lecturer in physics at the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in Paris. In 1860 he was promoted to the post of Professor of Physics at the Polytechnic Association for the Development of Popular Instruction. An amphitheatre at that institute is named after him.
In 1855, Planté discovered the first fossils of the prehistoric flightless bird Gastornis parisiensis (named after him) near Paris. This gigantic animal was a very close relative of the famous diatrymas of North America. At that time, Planté was at the start of his academic career, serving as a teaching assistant to A. E. Becquerel (father of the Nobel laureate Henri Becquerel). This early discovery—despite causing considerable furor in 1855—was soon to be overshadowed by Planté's subsequent discoveries.
Jean Becquerel (5 February 1878 – 4 July 1953) was a French physicist, and son of Antoine-Henri Becquerel. He worked on the optical and magnetic properties of crystals, discovering the rotation of the plane of polarisation by a magnetic field. He also published a textbook on relativity. In 1909, he became the fourth in his family to occupy the physics chair at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, following in the footsteps of his father, his grandfather A. E. Becquerel and his great-grandfather Antoine César Becquerel.
Leopold Freund (April 5, 1868 – January 7, 1943) was an Austrian-Jewish radiologist, considered the founder of medical radiology and radiotherapy.
Leopold Freund was born in Miskovice in Central Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now part of the Czech Republic. He died in Brussels in 1943.
Freund was a professor of radiology at the Medical University of Vienna and is considered the founder of medical radiology and radiotherapy. He is the first physician known to have used ionizing radiation for therapeutic purposes. In 1896, a year after the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen and in same year that Antoine Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, Freund successfully treated a five-year-old patient in Vienna suffering from hairy moles covering her whole back. The case was published by the girl's local physician, Schiff, in 1901. In 1903, he published the first textbook on radiation therapy.Freund also published fundamental work on the treatment occupational diseases with light and on the use of X-rays for testing construction materials.
Freund, who was a Jew, emigrated in 1938 to Belgium, following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
This is a list of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1908.
Many scientists have been recognized with the assignment of their names as international units by the International Committee for Weights and Measures or as non-SI units. The International System of Units (abbreviated SI from French: Système international d'unités) is the most widely used system of units of measurement. There are seven base units and 22 derived units (excluding compound units). These units are used both in science and in commerce. Two of the base SI units and 17 of the derived units are named after scientists. 28 non-SI units are named after scientists. By this convention, their names are immortalised. As a rule, the SI units are written in lowercase letters, but symbols of units derived from the name of a person begin with a capital letter.