Legendre mathematician biography summary

View two larger pictures. Biography Adrien-Marie Legendre would perhaps have disliked the fact that this article contains details of his life for Poisson wrote of him in [ 12 ] :- Our colleague has often expressed the desire that, in speaking of him, it would only be the matter of his works, which are, in fact, his entire life. It is not surprising that, given these views of Legendre, there are few details of his early life.

We have given his place of birth as Paris, as given in [ 1 ] and [ 2 ] , but there is some evidence to suggest that he was born in Toulouse and the family moved to Paris when he was very young. In the thesis he listed the literature that he would study and the results that he would be aiming to prove. With no need for employment to support himself, Legendre lived in Paris and concentrated on research.

Legendre meaning

He then decided to enter for the prize on projectiles offered by the Berlin Academy. The actual task was stated as follows:- Determine the curve described by cannonballs and bombs, taking into consideration the resistance of the air; give rules for obtaining the ranges corresponding to different initial velocities and to different angles of projection.

He wrote to Laplace asking for more information about the prize winning young mathematician. Legendre next studied the attraction of ellipsoids. He gave a proof of a result due to Maclaurin , that the attractions at an external point lying on the principal axis of two confocal ellipsoids was proportional to their masses.