unday morning in Paris offered an opportunity to walk to the Montparnasse Cemetery and pay my respects to some of my personal heroes buried there.
While the graves of Beckett, Cortázar and Poincaré attract plenty of attention and visitors, it is perhaps less well known that the great French mathematician Charles Hermite is buried there as well.
Hermite was not only a mentor to Henri Poincaré, Henri Padé, Thomas Stieltjes and Mihajlo Petrović Alas. His work on interpolation and function approximation lies at the very foundations of many modern numerical methods used in computational fluid dynamics and radiative transfer, even if that connection is not always obvious, or properly acknowledged.
His 1878 paper, Sur la formule d'interpolation de Lagrange, is still worth reading for anyone interested in function approximation, almost 150 years later.
Today, even the name on his gravestone is barely readable.
