Alan Mathison Turing
June 23 1912 - June 7 1954Born London, England. Died Wilmslow, England.
Turing's work was fundamental in the theoretical foundations of computer science.
Turing studied at King's College London and was a graduate student at Princeton University from 1936 to 1938. While at Princeton Turing published "On Computable Numbers", a paper in which he conceived an abstract machine, now called a Turing machine, which moved from one state to another using a precise set of rules.
Turing returned to England in 1938 and during World War II, he worked in the British Foreign Office. Here he played a leading role in efforts to break enemy codes.
In 1945 he joined the National Physical Laboratory in London and worked on the design and construction of a large computer, named Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).
In 1949 Turing became deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at Manchester where the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, the worlds largest memory computer, was being built.
He also worked on theories of artificial intelligence, and on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms.
Turing was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952. He died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but it is now thought by some to have been an accident.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
George Gabriel Stokes
Aug 13 1819 - Feb 1 1903Born Sligo, Ireland. Died Cambridge, England.
Stokes established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of viscosity (1851), describing the velocity of a small sphere through a viscous fluid.
Stokes published papers on the motion of incompressible fluids in 1842-43 and on the friction of fluids in motion and the equilibrium and motion of elastic solids in 1845.
In 1849 Stokes was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1851 Stokes was elected to the Royal Society and was secretary of the Society from 1854 to 1884 when he was elected president.
He investigated the wave theory of light, named and explained the phenomenon of fluorescence in 1852, and in 1854 theorised an explanation of the Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. He suggested these were caused by atoms in the outer layers of the Sun absorbing certain wavelengths. However when Kirchhoff later published this explanation Stokes disclaimed any prior discovery.
Stokes developed mathematical techniques for application to physical problems, founded the science of geodesy, and greatly advanced the study of mathematical physics in England. His mathematical and physical papers were published in 5 volumes, the first 3 of which Stokes edited himself in 1880, 1883 and 1891. The last 2 were edited by Sir Joseph Larmor in 1887 and 1891.
Aug 13 1819 - Feb 1 1903Born Sligo, Ireland. Died Cambridge, England.
Stokes established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of viscosity (1851), describing the velocity of a small sphere through a viscous fluid.
Stokes published papers on the motion of incompressible fluids in 1842-43 and on the friction of fluids in motion and the equilibrium and motion of elastic solids in 1845.
In 1849 Stokes was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1851 Stokes was elected to the Royal Society and was secretary of the Society from 1854 to 1884 when he was elected president.
He investigated the wave theory of light, named and explained the phenomenon of fluorescence in 1852, and in 1854 theorised an explanation of the Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. He suggested these were caused by atoms in the outer layers of the Sun absorbing certain wavelengths. However when Kirchhoff later published this explanation Stokes disclaimed any prior discovery.
Stokes developed mathematical techniques for application to physical problems, founded the science of geodesy, and greatly advanced the study of mathematical physics in England. His mathematical and physical papers were published in 5 volumes, the first 3 of which Stokes edited himself in 1880, 1883 and 1891. The last 2 were edited by Sir Joseph Larmor in 1887 and 1891.
Carle David TolmŽ Runge
Aug 30 1856 - Jan 3 1927Born Bremen, Germany. Died Göttingen, Germany.
Runge worked on a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations and later studied the wavelengths of the spectral lines of elements.
At the age of 19, after leaving school, Runge spent 6 months with his mother visiting the cultural centres of Italy. On his return to Germany he enrolled at the University of Munich to study literature. However after 6 weeks of the course he changed to mathematics and physics.
Runge attended courses with Max Planck and they became close friends. In 1877 both went to Berlin but Runge turned to pure mathematics after attending Weierstrass' lectures. His doctoral dissertation (1880) dealt with differential geometry.
After taking his secondary school teachers examinations he returned to Berlin where he was influenced by Kronecker. Runge then worked on a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations in which the roots were expressed as infinite series of rational functions of the coefficients.
Runge published little at that stage but after visiting Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm in September 1884 he produced a large number of papers in Mittag-Leffler's journal "Acta mathematica" (1885).
Runge obtained a chair at Hanover in 1886 and remained there for 18 years. Within a year Runge had moved away from pure mathematics to study the wavelengths of the spectral lines of elements other than hydrogen (J J Balmer had constructed a formula for the spectral lines of hydrogen.)
Runge did a great deal of experimental work and published a great quantity of results. He succeeded in arranging the spectral lines of helium in two spectral series and, until 1897, this was thought to be evidence that hydrogen was a mixture of two elements.
In 1904 Klein persuaded Göttingen to offer Runge a chair of Applied Mathematics, a post which Runge held until he retired in 1925.
Runge was always a fit and active man and on his 70 th birthday he entertained his grandchildren by doing handstands. However a few months later he had a heart attack and died.
Aug 30 1856 - Jan 3 1927Born Bremen, Germany. Died Göttingen, Germany.
Runge worked on a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations and later studied the wavelengths of the spectral lines of elements.
At the age of 19, after leaving school, Runge spent 6 months with his mother visiting the cultural centres of Italy. On his return to Germany he enrolled at the University of Munich to study literature. However after 6 weeks of the course he changed to mathematics and physics.
Runge attended courses with Max Planck and they became close friends. In 1877 both went to Berlin but Runge turned to pure mathematics after attending Weierstrass' lectures. His doctoral dissertation (1880) dealt with differential geometry.
After taking his secondary school teachers examinations he returned to Berlin where he was influenced by Kronecker. Runge then worked on a procedure for the numerical solution of algebraic equations in which the roots were expressed as infinite series of rational functions of the coefficients.
Runge published little at that stage but after visiting Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm in September 1884 he produced a large number of papers in Mittag-Leffler's journal "Acta mathematica" (1885).
Runge obtained a chair at Hanover in 1886 and remained there for 18 years. Within a year Runge had moved away from pure mathematics to study the wavelengths of the spectral lines of elements other than hydrogen (J J Balmer had constructed a formula for the spectral lines of hydrogen.)
Runge did a great deal of experimental work and published a great quantity of results. He succeeded in arranging the spectral lines of helium in two spectral series and, until 1897, this was thought to be evidence that hydrogen was a mixture of two elements.
In 1904 Klein persuaded Göttingen to offer Runge a chair of Applied Mathematics, a post which Runge held until he retired in 1925.
Runge was always a fit and active man and on his 70 th birthday he entertained his grandchildren by doing handstands. However a few months later he had a heart attack and died.
Blaise Pascal
June 19 1623 - Aug 19 1662Born Clermont-Ferrand, France. Died Paris, France.
Pascal's father >(Pascal, Étienne) had unorthodox educational views and decided to teach his son himself. He decided that Pascal was not to study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house. Pascal however, his curiosity raised by this, started to work on geometry himself at the age of 12. He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle are 2 right angles and, when his father found out he relented and allowed Pascal a copy of Euclid.
At the age of 14 Pascal started to attend Mersenne's meetings. Mersenne belonged to the religious order of the Minims, and his cell in Paris was a frequent meeting place for Fermat, Pascal, Gassendi, and others. At the age of 16 Pascal presented a single piece of paper to one of Mersenne's meetings. It contained a number of projective geometry theorems, including Pascal's mystic hexagon.
Pascal invented the first digital calculator(1642) to help his father. The device, called the Pascaline, resembled a mechanical calculator of the 1940's.
Further studies in geometry, hydrodynamics, and hydrostatic and atmospheric pressure led him to invent the syringe and hydraulic press and to discover Pascal's law of pressure.
He worked on conic sections and produced important theorems in projective geometry. In correspondence with Fermat he laid the foundation for the theory of probability.
His most famous work in philosophy is "Pensées", a collection of personal thoughts on human suffering and faith in God. 'Pascal's wager' claims to prove that belief in God is rational with the following argument.
"If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."
His last work was on the cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the circumference of a rolling circle.
Pascal died at the age of 39 in intense pain after a malignant growth in his stomach spread to the brain.
June 19 1623 - Aug 19 1662Born Clermont-Ferrand, France. Died Paris, France.
Pascal's father >(Pascal, Étienne) had unorthodox educational views and decided to teach his son himself. He decided that Pascal was not to study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house. Pascal however, his curiosity raised by this, started to work on geometry himself at the age of 12. He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle are 2 right angles and, when his father found out he relented and allowed Pascal a copy of Euclid.
At the age of 14 Pascal started to attend Mersenne's meetings. Mersenne belonged to the religious order of the Minims, and his cell in Paris was a frequent meeting place for Fermat, Pascal, Gassendi, and others. At the age of 16 Pascal presented a single piece of paper to one of Mersenne's meetings. It contained a number of projective geometry theorems, including Pascal's mystic hexagon.
Pascal invented the first digital calculator(1642) to help his father. The device, called the Pascaline, resembled a mechanical calculator of the 1940's.
Further studies in geometry, hydrodynamics, and hydrostatic and atmospheric pressure led him to invent the syringe and hydraulic press and to discover Pascal's law of pressure.
He worked on conic sections and produced important theorems in projective geometry. In correspondence with Fermat he laid the foundation for the theory of probability.
His most famous work in philosophy is "Pensées", a collection of personal thoughts on human suffering and faith in God. 'Pascal's wager' claims to prove that belief in God is rational with the following argument.
"If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."
His last work was on the cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the circumference of a rolling circle.
Pascal died at the age of 39 in intense pain after a malignant growth in his stomach spread to the brain.
Sir Isaac Newton
Jan 4 1643 - March 31 1727Born Woolsthorpe, England. Died London, England.
Newton's life can be divided into three quite distinct periods. The first is his boyhood days from 1643 up to his graduation in 1669. The second period from 1669 to 1687 was the highly productive period in which he was Lucasian professor at Cambridge. The third period (nearly as long as the other two combined) saw Newton as a highly paid government official in London with little further interest in mathematics.
Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Although he was born on Christmas Day 1642, the date given on this card is the Gregorian calendar date. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in England until 1752.)Newton came from a family of farmers but never knew his father who died before he was born. His mother remarried, moved to a nearby village, and left him in the care of his grandmother. Upon the death of his stepfather in 1656, Newton's mother removed him from grammar school in Grantham where he had shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'. An uncle decided that he should be prepared for the university, and he entered his uncle's old College, Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661.
Newton's aim at Cambridge was a law degree. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of study. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. The new algebra and analytical geometry of Viète, Descartes, and Wallis; and the mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him. Newton talent began to emerge on the arrival of Barrow to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge.
His scientific genius emerged suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of 1665 and he had to return to Lincolnshire. There, in a period of less than two years while Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.
While Newton remained at home he laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus several years before its independent discovery by Leibniz. The 'method of fluxions', as he termed it, was based on his crucial insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it. Taking differentiation as the basic operation, Newton produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves, and their maxima and minima. Newton's "De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum" was written in 1671 but Newton failed to get it published and it did not appear in print until John Colson produced an English translation in 1736.
Barrow resigned the Lucasian chair in 1669 recommending that Newton (still only 27 years old) be appointed in his place.
Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed this but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colours that was formed. Newton argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a given spectral colour. Newton was led by this to the erroneous, conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration. He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope. Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 after donating a reflecting telescope.
Also in 1672 Newton published his first scientific paper on light and colour in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Newton's paper was well received but Hooke and Huygens objected to Newton's attempt to prove by experiment alone that light consists in the motion of small particles rather than waves. Perhaps because of Newton's already high reputation his corpuscular theory reigned until the wave theory was revived in the 19th C.
Newton's relations with Hooke deteriorated and he turned in on himself and away from the Royal Society. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke in 1703. Newton's "Opticks" appeared in 1704. It dealt with the theory of light and colour and with (i) investigations of the colours of thin sheets (ii) 'Newton's rings' and (iii) diffraction of light.
To explain some of his observations he had to use a wave theory of light in conjunction to his corpuscular theory.
Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. However he did not have a correct understanding of the mechanics of circular motion.
Newton's novel idea of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth's gravity influenced the Moon, counter- balancing its centrifugal force. From his law of centrifugal force and Kepler's third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse- square law.
In 1679 Newton applied his mathematical skill to proving a conjecture of Hooke's, showing that if a body obeys Kepler's second law then the body is being acted upon by a centripetal force. This discovery showed the physical significance of Kepler's second law.
In 1684 Halley, tired of Hooke's boasting, asked Newton whether he could prove Hooke's conjecture and was told that Newton had solved the problem five years before but had now mislaid the paper. At Halley's urging Newton reproduced the proofs and expanded them into a paper on the laws of motion and problems of orbital mechanics.
Halley persuaded Newton to write a full treatment of his new physics and its application to astronomy. Over a year later (1687) Newton published the "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" or "Principia" as it is always known.
The "Principia" is recognised as the greatest scientific book ever written. Newton analysed the motion of bodies in resisting and non resisting media under the action of centripetal forces. The results were applied to orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendulums, and free-fall near the Earth. He further demonstrated that the planets were attracted toward the Sun by a force varying as the inverse square of the distance and generalised that all heavenly bodies mutually attract one another.
Further generalisation led Newton to the law of universal gravitation:
all matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena:- the eccentric orbits of comets; the tides and their variations; the precession of the Earth's axis; and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.
After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1693, Newton retired from research to take up a government position in London becoming Warden of the Royal Mint (1696) and Master(1699).
In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society and was re-elected each year until his death. He was knighted in 1708 by Queen Anne, the first scientist to be so honoured for his work.
Jan 4 1643 - March 31 1727Born Woolsthorpe, England. Died London, England.
Newton's life can be divided into three quite distinct periods. The first is his boyhood days from 1643 up to his graduation in 1669. The second period from 1669 to 1687 was the highly productive period in which he was Lucasian professor at Cambridge. The third period (nearly as long as the other two combined) saw Newton as a highly paid government official in London with little further interest in mathematics.
Isaac Newton was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Although he was born on Christmas Day 1642, the date given on this card is the Gregorian calendar date. (The Gregorian calendar was not adopted in England until 1752.)Newton came from a family of farmers but never knew his father who died before he was born. His mother remarried, moved to a nearby village, and left him in the care of his grandmother. Upon the death of his stepfather in 1656, Newton's mother removed him from grammar school in Grantham where he had shown little promise in academic work. His school reports described him as 'idle' and 'inattentive'. An uncle decided that he should be prepared for the university, and he entered his uncle's old College, Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661.
Newton's aim at Cambridge was a law degree. Instruction at Cambridge was dominated by the philosophy of Aristotle but some freedom of study was allowed in the third year of study. Newton studied the philosophy of Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle. The new algebra and analytical geometry of Viète, Descartes, and Wallis; and the mechanics of the Copernican astronomy of Galileo attracted him. Newton talent began to emerge on the arrival of Barrow to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge.
His scientific genius emerged suddenly when the plague closed the University in the summer of 1665 and he had to return to Lincolnshire. There, in a period of less than two years while Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy.
While Newton remained at home he laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus several years before its independent discovery by Leibniz. The 'method of fluxions', as he termed it, was based on his crucial insight that the integration of a function is merely the inverse procedure to differentiating it. Taking differentiation as the basic operation, Newton produced simple analytical methods that unified many separate techniques previously developed to solve apparently unrelated problems such as finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves, and their maxima and minima. Newton's "De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum" was written in 1671 but Newton failed to get it published and it did not appear in print until John Colson produced an English translation in 1736.
Barrow resigned the Lucasian chair in 1669 recommending that Newton (still only 27 years old) be appointed in his place.
Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed this but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colours that was formed. Newton argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a given spectral colour. Newton was led by this to the erroneous, conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration. He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope. Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1672 after donating a reflecting telescope.
Also in 1672 Newton published his first scientific paper on light and colour in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Newton's paper was well received but Hooke and Huygens objected to Newton's attempt to prove by experiment alone that light consists in the motion of small particles rather than waves. Perhaps because of Newton's already high reputation his corpuscular theory reigned until the wave theory was revived in the 19th C.
Newton's relations with Hooke deteriorated and he turned in on himself and away from the Royal Society. He delayed the publication of a full account of his optical researches until after the death of Hooke in 1703. Newton's "Opticks" appeared in 1704. It dealt with the theory of light and colour and with (i) investigations of the colours of thin sheets (ii) 'Newton's rings' and (iii) diffraction of light.
To explain some of his observations he had to use a wave theory of light in conjunction to his corpuscular theory.
Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. However he did not have a correct understanding of the mechanics of circular motion.
Newton's novel idea of 1666 was to imagine that the Earth's gravity influenced the Moon, counter- balancing its centrifugal force. From his law of centrifugal force and Kepler's third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse- square law.
In 1679 Newton applied his mathematical skill to proving a conjecture of Hooke's, showing that if a body obeys Kepler's second law then the body is being acted upon by a centripetal force. This discovery showed the physical significance of Kepler's second law.
In 1684 Halley, tired of Hooke's boasting, asked Newton whether he could prove Hooke's conjecture and was told that Newton had solved the problem five years before but had now mislaid the paper. At Halley's urging Newton reproduced the proofs and expanded them into a paper on the laws of motion and problems of orbital mechanics.
Halley persuaded Newton to write a full treatment of his new physics and its application to astronomy. Over a year later (1687) Newton published the "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica" or "Principia" as it is always known.
The "Principia" is recognised as the greatest scientific book ever written. Newton analysed the motion of bodies in resisting and non resisting media under the action of centripetal forces. The results were applied to orbiting bodies, projectiles, pendulums, and free-fall near the Earth. He further demonstrated that the planets were attracted toward the Sun by a force varying as the inverse square of the distance and generalised that all heavenly bodies mutually attract one another.
Further generalisation led Newton to the law of universal gravitation:
all matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Newton explained a wide range of previously unrelated phenomena:- the eccentric orbits of comets; the tides and their variations; the precession of the Earth's axis; and motion of the Moon as perturbed by the gravity of the Sun.
After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1693, Newton retired from research to take up a government position in London becoming Warden of the Royal Mint (1696) and Master(1699).
In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society and was re-elected each year until his death. He was knighted in 1708 by Queen Anne, the first scientist to be so honoured for his work.
Andrei Andreyevich Markov
June 14 1856 - July 20 1922Born Ryazan, Russia. Died St Petersburg, Russia.
Markov is best known for his work in probability and for stochastic processes especially Markov chains.
Markov was a graduate of Saint Petersburg University (1878), where he began a professor in 1886. Markov's early work was mainly in number theory and analysis, continued fractions, limits of integrals, approximation theory and the convergence of series.
After 1900 Markov applied the method of continued fractions, pioneered by his teacher Pafnuty Chebyshev, to probability theory. He also studied sequences of mutually dependent variables, hoping to establish the limiting laws of probability in their most general form. He proved the central limit theorem under fairly general assumptions.
Markov is particularly remembered for his study of Markov chains, sequences of random variables in which the future variable is determined by the present variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. This work launched the theory of stochastic processes.
In 1923 Norbert Wiener became the first to treat rigorously a continuous Markov process. The foundation of a general theory was provided during the 1930s by Andrei Kolmogorov.
Markov had a son (of the same name) who was born on September 9, 1903 and followed his father in also becoming a renowned mathematician.
June 14 1856 - July 20 1922Born Ryazan, Russia. Died St Petersburg, Russia.
Markov is best known for his work in probability and for stochastic processes especially Markov chains.
Markov was a graduate of Saint Petersburg University (1878), where he began a professor in 1886. Markov's early work was mainly in number theory and analysis, continued fractions, limits of integrals, approximation theory and the convergence of series.
After 1900 Markov applied the method of continued fractions, pioneered by his teacher Pafnuty Chebyshev, to probability theory. He also studied sequences of mutually dependent variables, hoping to establish the limiting laws of probability in their most general form. He proved the central limit theorem under fairly general assumptions.
Markov is particularly remembered for his study of Markov chains, sequences of random variables in which the future variable is determined by the present variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. This work launched the theory of stochastic processes.
In 1923 Norbert Wiener became the first to treat rigorously a continuous Markov process. The foundation of a general theory was provided during the 1930s by Andrei Kolmogorov.
Markov had a son (of the same name) who was born on September 9, 1903 and followed his father in also becoming a renowned mathematician.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
March 28 1749 - March 5 1827Born Beaumont-en-Auge, France. Died Paris, France.
Laplace proved the stability of the solar system. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing.
Laplace attended a Benedictine priory school in Beaumont between the ages of 7 and 16. At the age of 16 he entered Caen University intending to study theology. Laplace wrote his first mathematics paper while at Caen.
At the age of 19, mainly through the influence of d'Alembert, Laplace was appointed to a chair of mathematics at the École Militaire in Paris on the recommendation of d'Alembert. In 1773 he became a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1785, as examiner at the Royal Artillery Corps, he examined and passed the 16 year old Napoleon Bonaparte.
During the French Revolution he helped to establish the metric system. He taught calculus at the École Normale and became a member of the French Institute in 1795. Under Napoleon he was a member, then chancellor, of the Senate, received the Legion of Honour in 1805. However Napoleon, in his memoires written on St Hélène, says he removed Laplace from office after only six weeks
because he brought the spirit of the infinitely small into the government
Laplace became Count of the Empire in 1806 and he was named a marquis in 1817 after the restoration of the Bourbons. In his later years he lived in Arcueil, where he helped to found the Societe d'Arcueil and encouraged the research of young scientists.
Laplace presented his famous nebular hypothesis in "Exposition du systeme du monde" (1796), which viewed the solar system as originating from the contracting and cooling of a large, flattened, and slowly rotating cloud of incandescent gas.
Laplace discovered the invariability of planetary mean motions. In 1786 he proved that the eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits to each other always remain small, constant, and self-correcting. These results appear in his greatest work, "Traité du Mécanique Céleste" published in 5 volumes over 26 years (1799-1825).
Laplace also worked on probability and in particular derived the least squares rule. His "Théorie Analytique des Probabilités" was published in 1812.
He also worked on differential equations and geodesy. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing. With Antoine Lavoisier he conducted experiments on capillary action and specific heat. He also contributed to the foundations of the mathematical science of electricity and magnetism.
March 28 1749 - March 5 1827Born Beaumont-en-Auge, France. Died Paris, France.
Laplace proved the stability of the solar system. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing.
Laplace attended a Benedictine priory school in Beaumont between the ages of 7 and 16. At the age of 16 he entered Caen University intending to study theology. Laplace wrote his first mathematics paper while at Caen.
At the age of 19, mainly through the influence of d'Alembert, Laplace was appointed to a chair of mathematics at the École Militaire in Paris on the recommendation of d'Alembert. In 1773 he became a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1785, as examiner at the Royal Artillery Corps, he examined and passed the 16 year old Napoleon Bonaparte.
During the French Revolution he helped to establish the metric system. He taught calculus at the École Normale and became a member of the French Institute in 1795. Under Napoleon he was a member, then chancellor, of the Senate, received the Legion of Honour in 1805. However Napoleon, in his memoires written on St Hélène, says he removed Laplace from office after only six weeks
because he brought the spirit of the infinitely small into the government
Laplace became Count of the Empire in 1806 and he was named a marquis in 1817 after the restoration of the Bourbons. In his later years he lived in Arcueil, where he helped to found the Societe d'Arcueil and encouraged the research of young scientists.
Laplace presented his famous nebular hypothesis in "Exposition du systeme du monde" (1796), which viewed the solar system as originating from the contracting and cooling of a large, flattened, and slowly rotating cloud of incandescent gas.
Laplace discovered the invariability of planetary mean motions. In 1786 he proved that the eccentricities and inclinations of planetary orbits to each other always remain small, constant, and self-correcting. These results appear in his greatest work, "Traité du Mécanique Céleste" published in 5 volumes over 26 years (1799-1825).
Laplace also worked on probability and in particular derived the least squares rule. His "Théorie Analytique des Probabilités" was published in 1812.
He also worked on differential equations and geodesy. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing. With Antoine Lavoisier he conducted experiments on capillary action and specific heat. He also contributed to the foundations of the mathematical science of electricity and magnetism.
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