According to his birth certificate,[3] he was born in Nîmes in France on 14 August 1842, at 1 am. However, probably due to the midnight birth, Darboux himself usually reported his own birthday as 13 August, e.g. in his filled form for Légion d'Honneur.[4]
His parents were François Darboux, businessman of mercery, and Alix Gourdoux. The father died when Gaston was 7. His mother undertook the mercery business with great courage, and insisted that her children receive good education. Gaston had a younger brother, Louis, who taught mathematics at the Lycée Nîmes for almost his entire life.[5]
He studied at the Nîmes Lycée and the Montpellier Lycée before being accepted as the top qualifier at the École Normale Supérieure in 1861,[6] and received his PhD there in 1866. His thesis, written under the direction of Michel Chasles, was titled Sur les surfaces orthogonales. During his studies at the ENS, he also took lectures in Sorbonne University and Collège de France.
Darboux as a student of the École Normale Supérieure, c. 1865
In 1870, he co-founded the journal Bulletin des sciences mathématiques et astronomiques,[7] called "Darboux's Journal" by his contemporary mathematicians. The publishing house was the Henry Gauthier-Villars et Cie Éditeurs, located in Paris.[8]
In 1872, Darboux married the Beauvaisian milliner Amélie 'Célina' Carbonnier (1848–1911), daughter of Charles Louis Carbonnier, tailor, and Marie Victorine Anastase Hènocq. He and Célina had two children, Jean-Gaston (1870–1921), who was born at the time of the Siege of Paris and later became a marine zoologist at the Faculty of Science in Marseille, and Anaïs Berthe Lucie (1873–1970).[9]
He participated in the foundation of the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1880, an institute that aimed at training female educators and ran parallel to the École Normale Supérieure. Its first director was Julie Favre.[10]
