Jose Echegaray

José Echegaray was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, and one of the leading Spanish dramatists of the last quarter of the 19th century. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama". He was born in Madrid on 19 April 1832. His father was a doctor and professor of Greek, and his mother was from Navarra. He spent his childhood in Murcia, where he finished his elementary school education. It was there, at the Murcia Institute, where he first gained his love for mathematics. While still a child he read Goethe, Homer, and Balzac, readings that alternated with those of mathematicians like Gauss, Legendre, and Lagrange. In order to earn enough money to attend the Engineering School of Roads, Channels and Ports, he moved at the age of fourteen to Madrid. At the age of twenty, he left the Madrid School with a Civil Engineering degree, which he had obtained as first in his class, and he had to move to Almeria and Granada to begin working at his first job. In 1854 he began teaching a class at the Engineering School, working as a secretary there also. He taught mathematics, stereotomy, hydraulics, descriptive geometry, and differential and physical calculus from that year until 1868. From 1858 to 1860 he was also a professor at the Assistants' School of Public Works. His Problemas de geometría analítica (1865) and Teorías modernas de la física. Unidad de las fuerzas materiales (1867) were held in some regard. He became a member of the Society of Political Economy, helped to found the magazine La Revista, and took a prominent part in propagating free trade doctrines in the press and on the platform. He was clearly marked out for office, and when the revolution of 1868 overthrew the monarchy, he resigned his post for a place in the revolutionary cabinet. Echegaray also entered politics later in his life. As a founding member of the republican Radical Democratic Party, he enjoyed a career in the government sector, being appointed Minister of Education, of Public Works and Finance Minister successively between 1867 and 1874. He retired from politics after the Bourbon restoration in 1874. At the height of his career he turned to the stage, a passion that dated back to his youth. A mathematician, engineer, and administrator, he built his plays with the same regard for exactitude and duty that inspired his public life. Conflicts involving duty are at the heart of most of his plays, and he upheld the idea with uncompromising severity. His exalted romanticism appears in his choice of subjects. Like his great predecessors of the Spanish Golden Age, Echegaray was a prolific playwright. His most famous plays were: La esposa del vengador (1874) [The Avenger’s Wife]; En el puño de la espada (1875) [The Sword’s Handle]; En el pilar y en la cruz (1878) [The Stake and the Cross], a play defending the freedom of thought, which aroused much controversy; Conflicto entre dos deberes (1882) [Conflict of Duties], the title of which is programmatic for Echegaray’s entire work; O locura ó santidad (1877) [Madman or Saint]; and El gran Galeoto (1881) [Great Galeoto]. José Echegaray maintained constant activity until his death on 14 September 1916 in Madrid. His extensive work did not stop growing in his old age: in the final stage of his life he wrote 25 or 30 mathematical physics volumes. He was also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences. He was buried in the Saint Isidore Cemetery in Madrid. ²