Background

Henri Mineur was born on March 7, 1899, in Lille, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France to the family of Paul Mineur and Léonie Jacquet. Paul Mineur was a mathematics teacher who was teaching in Lille at the time when his son Henri was born. He later moved to Paris where he taught at the Collège Rollin (which was renamed the Lycée Rollin in 1919 and, since 1944 has been known as the Lycée Jacques-Decour).

Education

Mineur received all his schooling in Paris at the Collège Rollin where he showed remarkable talents in mathematics. Although he was the first on the admissions list of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1917, Mineur enlisted in the army and did not enter the school until after the end of World War I. After passing the agrégation in mathematics in 1921, he taught at the French lycée in Düsseldorf while pursuing the mathematical research he had begun in 1920. He received his doctorate in science in 1924 for his work on functional equations, in which he established an addition theorem for Fuchsian functions.

Career

After graduating, Mineur taught mathematics in the Lycée Français, a school in Dusseldorf, Germany, while he was completing his thesis. He had been interested in astronomy from a young age and in 1925 he left teaching to take up the post of "astronomer adjoint" in the Paris Observatory. In fact, he had worked at the Paris Observatory a few years earlier, being a trainee there in 1922-23. Mineur contributed to many areas of astronomy and mathematics including celestial mechanics, analytic mechanics, statistics and numerical analysis. Examples of his papers around 1930 are Sur les ondes de gravitation (1928) and La mécanique des masses variables. Le problème des deux corps (1933). In 1938 he wrote an important work on the least square method, Technique de la méthodes des moindres carrés. His most important work on numerical methods was Technique de calcul numérique (1952). In astronomy, Mineur made many significant discoveries. He worked on the propagation of gravitational waves, the evolution of double stars and the proper motions of the stars. He discovered that the speeds of the stars varied according to their distance from the plane of the galaxy. He also discovered the retrograde rotation of the system of globular clusters around the galaxy and corrected the coordinates for the position of the galactic center. His most significant astronomical discovery was to realize that there was an error in the accepted period-luminosity law for Cepheid variables and he published his revised version in Zéro de la relation période-luminosité (1944). Since the whole scale of the Universe is based on distances determined using this relationship, this discovery doubled the size of the Universe in the sense that all objects in the Universe were now shown to be twice as far away as previously thought. This had a huge impact for cosmology and, although ill at the time, he was able to attend the meeting in Rome in 1952 where Walter Baade announced independent confirmation of Mineur's scale for the universe. Mineur explained his work in this area in the book L'espace interstellaire (1947) which also contained details of his research into interstellar absorption. Earlier, in 1933, he had published L'Univers en Expansion.

Mineur published Histoire de l'astronomie stellaire jusqu'à l'époque contemporaine in 1934. This 57-page pamphlet looked at topics such as: The ancient world and medieval astronomy; Galileo and his successors; Birth of stellar astronomy; William Herschel; The first half of the XIXth century; The late nineteenth century and the early modern period; Large modern instruments; and Photograph of the sky. In 1936 the service for research in astrophysics was set up comprising of the Observatoire de Haute Provence and a laboratory in Paris. Later, in 1939, this became part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Mineur, together with Daniel Chalonge, was the main force behind the setting up of this service. Mineur was Secretary General of this service and director of the Paris laboratory but he was removed from these positions by the Vichy government after the fall of France during World War II. After the war, he became director of the Institute d'Astrophysique in Paris, a post he held for the rest of his life.

Achievements

• Henri Mineur was an acclaimed and widely respected astronomer of his time. He was twice honoured by the award of prizes from the Académie des Sciences. He also received the Legion of Honour. The crater Mineur on the Moon is named in his memory.

Works

More photos

• publication

  • Bulletin astronomique: Volume 5 1925
  • Bulletin astronomique: Volume 6 1930
  • Bulletin astronomique: Volume 7 1931
  • Annales de l'Observatoire d'astronomie physique de Paris, sis Parc de Meudon 1938

Politics

During the years 1940-1944 Mineur was an active member of the French Resistance risking his life on many occasions. In fact, Mineur's rapid release after being arrested by the Gestapo was because the German astronomer Karl-Otto Kiepenheuer was informed of his arrest by Gabrielle Mineur (who was already separated from her husband by this time) and Kiepenheuer was able to arrange for him to be freed immediately.

Personality

Henri Mineur suffered from alcohol addiction. He was proud. He had the respect of people to whom he owed nothing.

Physical Characteristics: Mineur had five years of bad health with heart and liver problems before his death at the early age of 55.

Connections

Mineur married Suzanne Fromant in 1926 and then remarried to Gabrielle Cloche in 1929 who later left him because of his alcohol addiction.

Father:

Paul Mineur

Mother:

Léonie Jacquet

ex-wife:

Suzanne Fromant

ex-wife:

Gabrielle Cloche

Friend:

Daniel Barbier

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981