Olry Terquem

Origins and early life

Olry Terquem was born at Metz on 16 June 1782 into a traditional Jewish household and had his first schooling in a heder before entering the secular lycée and then the École polytechnique, in the first years when the Revolution made that possible for a Jew in France.

Work and career

He taught mathematics at military schools, was librarian of the Central Artillery Depot in Paris until his death, and was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1828 and an officer in 1852. In geometry his name stays attached to the circle now called the nine-point circle: to the six points already known on it he added three more, and it is from his work that the modern statement descends. In 1842 he founded, with Camille-Christophe Gerono, the Nouvelles annales de mathématiques, a journal for teachers and candidates to the grandes écoles that ran for seventy years and shaped French mathematical teaching.

Under the pen name Tsarphati he published from 1821 a long series of Lettres tsarphatiques to his coreligionists, arguing for a thorough reform of French Judaism — he wanted the Sabbath moved to Sunday and defended marriage outside the community — while refusing conversion absolutely; of his brother, converted on his deathbed against his will in 1845, he wrote that he had been not only an Israelite but anti-Catholic to the highest degree. He died in Paris on 6 May 1862.