Francis Buekenhout
Francis Buekenhout (born: 23 April 1937) is a Belgian mathematician .
Life
He was born on 23 April 1937 in Ixelles near Brussels.
Career
He studied at the University of Brussels under Jacques Tits and Paul Libois. He introduced the term Quadratic Set.
Together with his teacher Tits, he developed concepts with the diagram geometries that largely disregard the concrete axiom systems of a projective or affine geometry and put these and many other incidence geometries into a common framework.The diagram geometries are also called " Buekenhout-Tits-Geometries" in their honor .
He worked at the ULB from 1960 to 1969 as an assistant to Libois. From 1969 to 1998 he was an extraordinary professor, from 1977 until his retirement in 2002. He has been a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique since May 2002 , and in 1982 he won the Prix François Deruyts of this academy.
Buekenhout co-founded the Belgian Mathematics Olympics in 1976 and organized them from 1976 to 1987.