Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 1813), one of the notable French mathematicians of the Revolutionary period, is remembered for his work in the fields of analysis, number theory and mechanics. Like Laplace and Legendre, Lagrange was assisted by d'Alembert, and it was on the recommendation of the latter and the urging of Frederick the Great himself that Lagrange succeeded Euler as the director of mathematics at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The two-volume Mecanique analytique was first published in 1788; the edition presented here is that of 1811 15, revised by the author before his...

Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 1813), one of the notable French mathematicians of the Revolutionary period, is remembered for his work in the fields of analysis, number theory and mechanics. Like Laplace and Legendre, Lagrange was assisted by d'Alembert, and it was on the recommendation of the latter and the urging of Frederick the Great himself that Lagrange succeeded Euler as the director of mathematics at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The two-volume Mecanique analytique was first published in 1788; the edition presented here is that of 1811 15, revised by the author before his...

Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752 1833), one of the great French mathematicians active in the Revolutionary period, made important contributions to number theory, statistics, mathematical analysis and algebra. He taught at the Ecole Militaire, where he was a colleague of Laplace, and made his name with a paper on the trajectory of projectiles which won a prize of the Berlin Academy in 1782, and brought him to the attention of Lagrange. In 1794 he published Elements de geometrie, which remained a textbook for over 100 years. The first edition of his Essai sur la theorie des nombres was published in...

The work of the Marquis de Laplace (1749 1827) was enormously influential in the development of mathematical physics, astronomy and statistics. Educated in Normandy, he moved to Paris on obtaining a letter of introduction to d'Alembert, who acted as his mentor while he undertook teaching and independent research in probability, statistics and astronomy. Laplace survived the turmoil of the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons by a series of manoeuvres which gave him a reputation for insincerity and hypocrisy even among his peers who could correctly assess...

The two great works of the celebrated French mathematician Henri Lebesgue (1875 1941), Lecons sur l'integration et la recherche des fonctions primitives professees au College de France (1904) and Lecons sur les series trigonometriques professees au College de France (1906) arose from lecture courses he gave at the College de France while holding a teaching post at the University of Rennes. In 1901 Lebesgue formulated measure theory; and in 1902 his new definition of the definite integral, which generalised the Riemann integral, revolutionised integral calculus and greatly expanded the scope...

In 1770, one of the founders of pure mathematics, Leonard Euler (1707 1783), published an algebra textbook for students. It was soon translated into French, with notes and additions by Joseph-Louis Lagrange, another giant of eighteenth-century mathematics, and the French edition was used as the basis of the English edition of 1822 (which also appears in this series), and of this 1790s German edition by Johann Philipp Gruson, Professor of Mathematics to the royal cadets. Volume 2 consists of two parts: 16 chapters on algebraic equations, followed by 15 chapters on analyses of indeterminate...

Sir George Stokes (1819 1903) established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of viscosity describing the velocity of a small sphere through a viscous fluid. He published no books, but was a prolific lecturer and writer of papers for the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Victoria Institute and other mathematical and scientific institutions. These collected papers (issued between 1880 and 1905) are therefore the only readily available record of the work of an outstanding and influential mathematician, who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in...

Sir George Stokes (1819 1903) established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of viscosity describing the velocity of a small sphere through a viscous fluid. He published no books, but was a prolific lecturer and writer of papers for the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Victoria Institute and other mathematical and scientific institutions. These collected papers (issued between 1880 and 1905) are therefore the only readily available record of the work of an outstanding and influential mathematician, who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in...

Sir George Stokes (1819 1903) established the science of hydrodynamics with his law of viscosity describing the velocity of a small sphere through a viscous fluid. He published no books, but was a prolific lecturer and writer of papers for the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Victoria Institute and other mathematical and scientific institutions. These collected papers (issued between 1880 and 1905) are therefore the only readily available record of the work of an outstanding and influential mathematician, who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in...

Augustin-Louis, Baron Cauchy (1789 1857) was the pre-eminent French mathematician of the nineteenth century. He began his career as a military engineer during the Napoleonic Wars, but even then was publishing significant mathematical papers, and was persuaded by Lagrange and Laplace to devote himself entirely to mathematics. His greatest contributions are considered to be the Cours d'analyse de l'Ecole Royale Polytechnique (1821), Resume des lecons sur le calcul infinitesimal (1823) and Lecons sur les applications du calcul infinitesimal a la geometrie (1826 8), and his pioneering work...