French mathematician who did brilliant work in many branches of mathematics, but was plagued by poor performance in exams as a student. However, on his own, he mastered Lagrange's memoir on the solution of numerical equations and Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. He was admitted to the École Polytechnique, but his test score ranked him 68th. He was forced to leave after one year when it was decided that his congenitally deformed right leg would not allow him to take a commission in the military, making him not worth the Polytechnique's time.

Hermite did pioneering work on Abelian functions. In 1869, he became a professor at École Normale, and in 1870 at Sorbonne. All during his career, was generous in his help of young mathematicians. He showed that e was a transcendental number (i.e., one that could not be the solution of any finite polynomial equation). He studied algebraic invariants and also investigated a class of differential equation now called the Hermite differential equation. This equation was later found to arise in the quantum mechanical treatment of the simple harmonic oscillator. The solutions are known as Hermite polynomials. Hermite also discovered some of the properties of Hermitian matrices and solved the general quintic equation using elliptic modular functions.

Additional biographies: MacTutor (St. Andrews)