Died: 12 February 1962 in Paris, France

Joseph Pérès was the son of a famous philosopher. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, entering in 1908 and graduating three years later. He was awarded a scholarship to support him while he undertook research for his doctorate, and Borel introduced him to Volterra who made many journeys to France to promote scientific collaboration.

Pérès went to Italy to work for his doctorate under Volterra but he returned to France and was teaching at the Lycée at Montpellier when he submitted his thesis Sur les fonctions permutable do Volterra in 1915. He taught at Toulouse and then at Strasbourg before being appointed Professor of Rational and Applied Mechanics at Marseilles in 1921.

At Marseilles, Pérès founded an institute of fluid mechanics in 1930. However, he only remained at Marseilles for two years after this before he was offered a chair at the Sorbonne. There he balanced his career between teaching and research being active in both while at the same time taking on some major administrative roles such as Dean of the Faculty of Science in Paris from 1954 to 1961. On the research front he was awarded prizes from the Académie des Sciences in 1932, again in 1938 and for yet a third time in 1940. Two years after he received this third prize he was elected to membership of the Académie.

Pérès' work on analysis and mechanics was always influenced by Volterra, extending results of Volterra's on integral equations. His work in this area is now of relatively little importance since perhaps even for its day it was somewhat old fashioned.

A joint collaboration between Pérès and Volterra led to the first volume of Theorie generale des fonctionnelles published in 1936. Although the project was intended to lead to further volumes only this one was ever published. This work is discussed in [3] where the author points out that the book belongs to an older tradition, being based on ideas introduced by Volterra himself from 1887 onwards. By the time the work was published the ideas it contained were no longer in the mainstream of development of functional analysis since topological and algebraic concepts introduced by Banach, von Neumann, Stone and others were determining the direction of the subject.

However, the analysis which Pérès and Volterra studied proved important in developing ideas of mathematical physics rather than analysis and Pérès made good use of them in his applications. He studied the dynamics of viscous fluids and the theory of vortices with applications to aeronautics in mind. Costabel writes in [1]:-

1. P Costabel, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970-1990). 
   http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2830903348.html

Articles:

1. P Costabel, Joseph Jean Camille Pérès, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 15 (1962), 137-140.
2. A Guerraggio, The 'Théorie générale des fonctionnelles' of V Volterra and J Pérès (Italian), in Italian mathematics between the two world wars, Milan-Gargnano, 1986 (Bologna, 1987), 187-207.

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