The origins of a mathematical heritage: The library of Gaston Darboux’s cabinet of Higher Geometry (1900–1917)

Between 1900 and 1917, Gaston Darboux (1842-1917) built up a library associated with his Chair in Higher Geometry at the Paris Faculty of Science, which forms the initial nucleus of today’s library at the Institut Henri Poincaré, inaugurated in 1928. Created in the wake of a series of reforms instituting a new university system in France, this library serves not only as a current working tool for his teaching and research activities, but also as a testimony to the mathematics of his time.