Legendre, ADRIEN MARIE

Legendre, ADRIEN MARIE, a very distinguished mathematician, was born at Toulouse in 1752. After studying at the Collège Mazarin in Paris he gained the attention of D'Alembert, and through him was appointed professor of Mathematics at the Military School. After several proofs that he had mastered the modern analysis, and especially on account of his memoir on the attraction of spheroids of revolution, Legendre was in 1783 chosen member of the Academy of Sciences. Appointed in 1787 one of the commissioners to connect Greenwich and Paris by triangulation, he was chosen member of the Royal Society of London. In his report Legendre gave the first enunciation of the 'proposition of spherical excess,' now considered an essential theorem of trigonometry, just as in 1806 he gave out the first proposal to use the 'method of least squares' in his Nouvelles Méthodes pour la Détermination des Orbites des Comètes. Under the empire Legendre was appointed honorary member of council for life, and member of the Commission of Public Instruction, having already been appointed to the Bureau des Longitudes and examiner at the Polytechnic. In 1827 appeared his Traité des Fonctions Elliptiques, a subject with which his name must remain permanently associated. He wrote several other mathematical treatises, some of the highest importance. His Théorie des Nombres (1830) is still a classical work and evinces much original power. His best-known book is his Éléments de Géométrie (1794), which has been translated into many languages—by Thomas Carlyle into English (1824). It is probably due to an attempt to supersede Euclid as a textbook; and if so it is one of the most successful. Legendre died in Paris on 10th January 1833.