β Scribed by Maurice Pouzet
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
After six months in Chile, where he worked as an architect, he moved to Buenos-Aires. J. Rey Pastor, an important figure in the Spanish mathematical world, and student of Carathtodory, offered him a position of Assistant at the University of Buenos-Aires. It was Rey Pastor, whom he had known since his studies in Barcelona, who was the first to encourage the blossoming of Corominas' mathematical thoughts. After one year, dedicated to reading mathematical works which had been deprived him for so long, he was named Full Professor in the Institute of Economics at Mendoza, several thousand kilometers from Buenos-Aires, near Santiago, but on the other side of the Andean Range. He taught finance mathematics until 1946 when he, like hundreds of other colleagues, was relieved, by General Peron, of his position.
During this South American period he met Marie Edith Guevara (cousin of her well-known namesake) whom he married in 1946.
This period witnessed the growth of his mathematical personality. As is well known, a function is a polynomial as soon as a derivative vanishes. A. Denjoy used his "totalisation" to obtain the same conclusion for the "Peano derivative" (defined as the nth coefficient of its power series). Corominas eliminated the "totalisation" and developed a differential calculus based on the "Peano derivative" [ 11.
In 1947 Denjoy offered him a position at the C.N.R.S. in Paris. Here, at the heart of Parisian mathematics, Corominas found himself among P. Malliavin, J. P. Kahane and G. Choquet, taking up work on "asymptotic algebra". Together, with Sunyer-I-Balaguer, he established the spectacular result, now classic, that a function infinitely differentiable is a polynomial, if, at each point, some derivative vanishes. In 1952 he defended his thesis under Denjoy [2]. (Other students of Denjoy included G. Choquet, D. Kurepa, and R. de Possel, whose students, in turn, included R. Fraisse.) It was perhaps not entirely surprising that Corominas would turn later to ordered sets.
After this same Parisian period, during which his three children Edith, Henri, and Helene were born, he decided to return to Spain, where Rey Pastor offered him a post at the Spanish C.N.R.S. Although his ambition was to establish a school, he was disappointed and, in 1955, he left, alone, to accept an invitation from the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he was soon led to "ordered sets". The following year he lectured on ordered sets in Barcelona. Life was difficult and in 1960 he decided to leave for Caracas, where in an atmosphere of civil unrest, he worked alone on ordered sets.
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