René de Saussure

René de Saussure (1868 to 1943) was a Swiss Esperantist and professional mathematician who composed important works about the linguistics of Esperanto and interlinguistics. Born in Geneva, he was the son of the scientist Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure and the brother of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the sinologist Léopold de Saussure. He defended a doctoral thesis on a subject in geometry at the Johns Hopkins University in 1895 and until 1899 was professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and later in Geneva and Bern. His main work is an analysis of the logic of word construction in Esperanto, which defends the language against Idist critiques, and in 1907 he proposed the international currency spesmilo.