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...