According to his birth certificate, he was born in
Nîmes in
France on 14 August 1842, at 1 am. However, probably due to the midnight birth, Darboux himself usually reported his own birthday as 13 August,
e.g. in his filled form for Légion d'Honneur. His parents were François Darboux, businessman of mercery, and Alix Gourdoux. The father died when Gaston was 7. His mother undertook the mercery business with great courage, and insisted that her children receive good education. Gaston had a younger brother, Louis, who taught mathematics at the Lycée Nîmes for almost his entire life. He studied at the Nîmes Lycée and the
Montpellier Lycée before being accepted as the top qualifier at the
École Normale Supérieure in 1861, and received his
PhD there in 1866. His thesis, written under the direction of
Michel Chasles, was titled
Sur les surfaces orthogonales. During his studies at the ENS, he also took lectures in
Sorbonne University and
Collège de France. In 1870, he co-founded the journal
Bulletin des sciences mathématiques et astronomiques, called "Darboux's Journal" by his contemporary mathematicians. The publishing house was the Henry Gauthier-Villars et Cie Éditeurs, located in Paris. In 1872, Darboux married the Beauvaisian
milliner Amélie 'Célina' Carbonnier (1848–1911), daughter of Charles Louis Carbonnier, tailor, and Marie Victorine Anastase Hènocq. He and Célina had two children, Jean-
Gaston (1870–1921), who was born at the time of the
Siege of Paris and later became a marine zoologist at the Faculty of Science in Marseille, and Anaïs Berthe
Lucie (1873–1970). He participated in the foundation of the
École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1880, an institute that aimed at training female educators and ran parallel to the École Normale Supérieure. Its first director was
Julie Favre. In 1884, Darboux was elected to the
Académie des Sciences. Darboux made several important contributions to
geometry and
mathematical analysis (see, for example,
linear PDEs). He was a
biographer of
Henri Poincaré and he edited the Selected Works of
Joseph Fourier. Among his students were
Émile Borel,
Élie Cartan,
Édouard Goursat,
Émile Picard,
Gheorghe Țițeica and
Stanisław Zaremba. In 1892 he was awarded honorary membership of the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and in 1900, he was appointed the academy's permanent secretary of its Mathematics section. In 1902, he was elected to the
Royal Society and the
American Philosophical Society; in 1916, he received the
Sylvester Medal from the Society. In 1908, he was a
plenary speaker at the
International Congress of Mathematicians in
Rome. He continued to contribute to the French
Bulletin des sciences mathématiques, even after 1916. == Named in his honour ==