Jean Céa (8 February 1932 – 9 January 2024) was a French mathematician.
Born to Spanish immigrants in Aïn Témouchent, Algeria (he learnt French in school), he studied at the Ecole normale d'instituteurs d'Oran and the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1964 with his dissertation Approximation variationnelle des problèmes aux limites.
[1][2] In his thesis he proved the Céa's lemma, an important result related to error estimation in the Finite Element Method.
Céa was emeritus professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and member of the Academia Europaea.
Céa died on 9 January 2024 in Nice, at the age of 91.