Jean François Chazy (15 August 1882,Villefranche-sur-Saône – 9 March 1955,Paris) was a Frenchmathematician andastronomer.
Chazy was the son of a small provincial manufacturer and studied mathematics at theÉcole Normale Supérieure with completion of theagrégation in 1905. He received his doctorate in 1910 with thesisÉquations différentielles du troisième ordre et d’ordre supérieur dont l’intégrale générale a ses points critiques fixes. In 1911 he wasmaître de conférences for mechanics inGrenoble and then inLille. In World War I he served in the artillery and became famous for accurately predicting the location of theGerman siege gun which bombarded Paris.[1] After the war he was again professor in theFaculté des Sciences de Lille (which later became theLille University of Science and Technology). Simultaneously he taught at theInstitut industriel du Nord (École Centrale de Lille). In 1923 he wasmaître de conférences at theÉcole centrale des arts et manufactures in Paris (as well as examiner at theÉcole polytechnique). In 1924 he became professor for mechanics and later for celestial mechanics at theSorbonne, where he retired in 1953 as professor emeritus.
He worked on celestial mechanics and especially on thethree-body problem and theperihelion precession ofMercury's orbit. The problem of explaining Mercury's orbit was solved byAlbert Einstein'sgeneral relativity theory.
In 1922 Chazy was awarded theValz Prize from theFrench Academy of Sciences for his papers on thethree-body problem.[2] He was an Invited Speaker of theICM in 1924 at Toronto[3] and in 1928 at Bologna. In 1937 he was elected to theAcadémie des Sciences in theAstronomie section. He was also a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Belgian Academy of Sciences. In 1934 he was president of theSociété Mathématique de France. Since 1952 he was an official member of theBureau des Longitudes. He was made a commander of theLégion d'honneur.
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