Georges Brunel

Georges Brunel (1854–1900) was born in Abbeville near Amiens. He attended schools in Abbeville, Lille, and Paris before entering the École normale supérieure in 1877 to study mathematics. After graduation in 1880, he spent the academic year 1880-81 in Leipzig working under Felix Klein. When he introduced himself in his first letter to Poincaré, he wrote as a “comrade”, i. e. fellow normalien of Paul Appell and Émile Picard, although both, to be sure, were a few years ahead of him there (Appell entered the École normale in 1873, Picard in 1874).