Born Mar. 24, 1809, in St. Orner; died Sept. 8, 1882, in Paris. French mathematician. Member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1839).
Liouville was a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (from 1833) and the Collège de France (from 1839). He constructed the theory of elliptic functions, which he viewed as doubly periodic functions of a complex variable. He also studied the boundary-value problem for second-order linear differential equations (the Sturm-Liouville problem). Liouville proved the existence of transcendental numbers and gave an actual construction of such numbers. He established a fundamental theorem in mechanics (Liouville’s theorem) on the integration of the canonical equations of dynamics.