Marie alfred cornu biography channels

(b. Orléans, France, 6 March 1841; d. La Chansonnerie, near Romartin, France, 12 April 1902),

optics.

Cornu entered the École Polytechnique in 1860, graduated second in his class in 1862, and proceeded to the École des Mines.

Clothoid road

In 1864 he was appointed repetiteur at the École Polytechnique, where he became professor of physics in 1867, the year in which he was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on crystal-line reflection. He became a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1878 and was an associate of many foreign scientific bodies, including the Royal Society of London (1884) and the U.S.

National Académy of Sciences (1901).

While still a probationer at the École des Mines, Cornu was attracted to experimental optics by an exhaustive study of Felix Billet’s celebrated Traité d’optique, and he repeated all the experiments in this work in his spare time.

Following Jules Jamin, he showed that reflection at metallic surfaces proceeds exactly as in the cas