Julio Rey Pastor
Born: 16 Aug 1888 in Logrono, Spain
Died: 21 Feb 1962 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Julio Rey Pastor studied science at the University of Zaragoza and published his first mathematics book at the age of 17. He had broad interests in his youth, however, and before he became completely occupied with mathematics, he had written poetry.
He was appointed professor of mathematical analysis at Oviedo University in 1911. The university, in Oviedo in northern Spain, was an ancient university founded in 1608. Rey Pastor was accused of being unpatriotic in describing the deplorable state of Spanish science under the Hapsburgs. This happened as the result of his inaugural address given for the session 1913-14 on Spanish mathematicians of the 16th century.
A series of visits by Rey Pastor to Germany resulted in two major publications on geometry in 1912 and 1916. The 1916 monograph was on synthetic geometry in n-dimensions and introduced [1]:-
... concepts of great generality (for example the definition of the curve) and developing them in all their consequences.
Rey Pastor moved to a chair in Madrid in 1915. However he was not one to remain fixed in one place for a long time and went to Barcelona in 1915 to give a series of lectures at the Institut d'Estudia. His lectures there on n-dimensional geometry and conformal mappings, developing the work of Schwarz, was written up by Esteban Terrades who attended the lectures, and the course was published in Catalan.
It was not only a Spanish visit to lecture that Rey Pastor made, however, for he made a visit to Argentina in 1917 and lectured the University of Buenos Aires. Although he was still a young man only 29 years old, he was asked to help promote mathematics in Argentina and a way was found to enable him to do this. A contract was proposed which enabled him to spend six months each year in Argentina and six months in Spain. Rey Pastor was pleased to sign the contract:-
... to direct the advanced study of the exact sciences in Argentina.
A famous monograph which Rey Pastor published in 1917 contained most of his own mathematical discoveries. The history of mathematics had always interested Rey Pastor and late in his career his interests in historical topics extended to cartography. Of course Spain has a reputation for remarkable cartography so his monograph (written jointly with E Garcia Camarero in 1960) on the history of Spanish cartography was a particularly useful addition to knowledge of the topic.