Leau studied at the École normal supérieure in Paris and received his doctorate there in April 1897.[5] Later he was a professor at the University of Nancy . There he was Dean of the Faculté des Sciences from 1931–34.
In his dissertation, Leau examined, among other things, the iteration behavior of holomorphic functions in the environment of a rationally indifferent fixed point. His results are known today under the name (Leau-Fatou) Flower Theorem . They play an important role in the complex dynamics.
^Koerner, E. F. K. (1974), "An Annotated Chronological Bibliography of Western Histories of Linguistic Thought, 1822-1972. Part I: 1822-1915", Historiographia Linguistica, 1 (1): 81–94, doi:10.1075/hl.1.1.06koe.
^Die Dissertation Étude sur les équations fonctionnelles à une ou à plusieurs variables erschien in: Annales de la Faculté des sciences de Toulouse: Mathématiques, Série 1, Band 11 (1897), Heft 2, Seiten E.1-E.110. Digitalisat bei Numdam: Teil 1, Teil 2
Daniel S. Alexander: A history of complex dynamics: from Schröder to Fatou and Julia. (Aspects of Mathematics), Vieweg, Braunschweig 1994, ISBN3-528-06520-6 . Chapter 5 describes Leau's contributions.