Philippe Le Corbeiller
| Philippe Le Corbeiller | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 11, 1891 Paris, France |
| Died |
July 24, 1980 Wassenaar, the Netherlands |
| Residence | France, U.S., Netherlands |
| Nationality | France, U.S. |
| Fields | Electrical engineering, mathematics, physics, economics |
| Institutions | Harvard |
| Alma mater | École Polytechnique, University of Paris |
| Doctoral advisor | Charles Émile Picard |
| Doctoral students | Kumpati S. Narendra, Rui de Figueiredo |
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller (January 11, 1891 – July 24, 1980) was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator.
He was trained as an engineer at the École Polytechnique (entering class of 1910), served in the French Signal Corps during World War I, worked on telegraph and radio systems, and in 1926 received a doctorate in mathematics from the Sorbonne, having written a thesis on indefinite quadratic forms under the supervision of Charles Émile Picard.
He was a close friend of Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol, whose work on nonlinear self-oscillating dynamical systems (see van der Pol oscillator) he extended and popularized among electrical engineers, mathematicians, and economists.
In 1941 he fled the German occupation of France during World War II and became a lecturer in electronics at Harvard University. He eventually became a US citizen and a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard. He returned to Europe in 1968 and lived the rest of his life in the Netherlands.
His intellectual interests were quite varied, spanning several branches of pure and applied mathematics, as well as electronics, acoustics, control theory, economics, and the history and philosophy of science. At Harvard he had a major influence on the work of economic theorist Richard M. Goodwin.
He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Acoustical Society of America, as well as a member of the American Physical Society and the Econometric Society.
References
- Robert Bruce Lindsay (1981). "Philippe Le Corbeiller (1891-1980)". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 69 (5): 1524. doi:10.1121/1.385750.
- "Le Corbeiller: Philosophizing Physicist", from the Harvard Crimson, March 3, 1948.