# joseph lagrange mathematician biography

Joseph Louis Lagrange was not his original name; he was baptized Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia. Biography. Lecture des œuvres d'Euler sur les isopérimètres. His lectures there were quite elementary, and contain nothing of any special importance, but they were published because the professors had to "pledge themselves to the representatives of the people and to each other neither to read nor to repeat from memory," and the discourses were ordered to be taken down in shorthand to enable the deputies to see how the professors acquitted themselves. He always thought out the subject of his papers before he began to compose them, and usually wrote them straight off without a single erasure or correction. Joseph Louis Lagrange, the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century, was born at Turin on January 25, 1736, and died at Paris on April 10, 1813. [14] Lagrange also applied his ideas to problems of classical mechanics, generalising the results of Euler and Maupertuis. Starting in 1754, he worked on the problem of the tautochrone, discovering a method of maximizing and minimizing functionals in a way similar to finding extrema of functions. [15] Lagrange published his method in two memoirs of the Turin Society in 1762 and 1773. The object of the book is to show that the subject is implicitly included in a single principle, and to give general formulae from which any particular result can be obtained. Joseph Louis Lagrange, born as Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, was born to Italian parents, who were of French descent on 25th January 1736. Nonetheless, during his years in Berlin, Lagrange's health was rather poor, and that of his wife Vittoria was even worse. Joseph-Louis Lagrange [lower-alpha 1] (born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia [lower-alpha 2] or Giuseppe Ludovico De la Grange Tournier; [lower-alpha 3] 25 January 1736 – 10 April 1813), also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian mathematician and astronomer, later naturalized French.He made significant … Joseph-Louis Lagrange (born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia) was an Italian Enlightenment Era mathematician and astronomer. Under intervention of Antoine Lavoisier, who himself was by then already thrown out of the Academy along with many other scholars, Lagrange was specifically exempted by name in the decree of October 1793 that ordered all foreigners to leave France. According to Alessandro Papacino D'Antoni, the academy's military commander and famous artillery theorist, Lagrange unfortunately proved to be a problematic professor with his oblivious teaching style, abstract reasoning, and impatience with artillery and fortification-engineering applications. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics. Joseph Lagrange. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, … Joseph-Louis Lagrange[a] (born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia[5][b] or Giuseppe Ludovico De la Grange Tournier;[6][c] 25 January 1736 â 10 April 1813), also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange[7] or Lagrangia,[8] was an Italian mathematician and astronomer, later naturalized French. In this opera, he lays down the law of virtual work, and from that one fundamental principle, by the aid of the calculus of variations, deduces the whole of mechanics, both of solids and fluids. 0. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics. He proved that every natural number is a sum of four squares. He was instrumental in the decimalisation in Revolutionary France, became the first professor of analysis at the Ãcole Polytechnique upon its opening in 1794, was a founding member of the Bureau des Longitudes, and became Senator in 1799. Period 00. At the beginning of his residence in Paris he was seized with an attack of melancholy, and even the printed copy of his MÃ©canique on which he had worked for a quarter of a century lay for more than two years unopened on his desk. Every night he set himself a definite task for the next day, and on completing any branch of a subject he wrote a short analysis to see what points in the demonstrations or in the subject-matter were capable of improvement. n [7] Lagrange's father, Giuseppe Francesco Lodovico, was doctor in Law at the University of Torino, while his mother was the only child of a rich doctor of Cambiano, in the countryside of Turin. C Comte, Joseph-Louis Lagrange poÃ¨te scientifique et citoyen europeen. J B J Delambre, Notice sur la vie et les ouvages de M le Comte J L Lagrange. Like Euler, Lagrange turned his attention to the many results that had been stated without proof by Pierre de Fermat. The next work he produced was in 1764 on the libration of the Moon, and an explanation as to why the same face was always turned to the earth, a problem which he treated by the aid of virtual work. The second volume contains a long paper embodying the results of several papers in the first volume on the theory and notation of the calculus of variations; and he illustrates its use by deducing the principle of least action, and by solutions of various problems in dynamics. We welcome any additional information. But Lagrange does not seem to have been a successful teacher. Lagrange was not very interested in mathematics in his early life. In September 1793, the Reign of Terror began. In 1786, Frederick II died, and the climate of Berlin became difficult for Lagrange.[10]. First, his contributions to the fourth and fifth volumes, 1766â1773, of the Miscellanea Taurinensia; of which the most important was the one in 1771, in which he discussed how numerous astronomical observations should be combined so as to give the most probable result. Lagrange was awarded the 1764 prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his memoir on the libration of the Moon. P Delsedime, La disputa delle corde vibranti ed una lettera inedita di Lagrange a Daniel Bernoulli, P Dugac, La thÃ©orie des fonctions analytiques de Lagrange et la notion d'infini, in. ⁡ Biography Joseph-Louis Lagrange is usually considered to be a French mathematician, but the Italian Encyclopaedia [40] refers to him as an Italian mathematician. His paternal great-grandfather was a French army officer who had moved to Turin, the de facto capital of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia at Lagrange's time, and married an Italian; so did his grandfather and his father. The mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange … He spent the next twenty years in Prussia, where he produced a long series of papers published in the Berlin and Turin transactions, and composed his monumental work, the MÃ©canique analytique. Lagrange remarked that mechanics was really a branch of pure mathematics analogous to a geometry of four dimensions, namely, the time and the three coordinates of the point in space; and it is said that he prided himself that from the beginning to the end of the work there was not a single diagram. His achievements are astounding. In appearance he was of medium height, and slightly formed, with pale blue eyes and a colourless complexion. Lagrange was one of the creators of the calculus of variations, deriving the EulerâLagrange equations for extrema of functionals. {\displaystyle y=a\sin(mx)\sin(nt)\,} Differential calculus and calculus of variations, Although some authors speak of general method of solving ". After all, the future researcher was born in Turin, in 1736. In a note at the end he shows how Fermat's little theorem, that is. Log In Once logged in, you can add biography in the database. Lagrange's lectures on the differential calculus at Ãcole Polytechnique form the basis of his treatise ThÃ©orie des fonctions analytiques, which was published in 1797. Fraser, Craig G., 2005, "ThÃ©orie des fonctions analytiques" in. Naissance à Turin. Joseph-Louis Lagrange was a mathematician and astronomer from the eighteenth century. His papers of 1773, 1775, and 1777 gave demonstrations of several results enunciated by Fermat, and not previously proved. where p is a prime and a is prime to p, may be applied to give the complete algebraic solution of any binomial equation. In 1758, with the aid of his pupils (mainly with Daviet), Lagrange established a society, which was subsequently incorporated as the Turin Academy of Sciences, and most of his early writings are to be found in the five volumes of its transactions, usually known as the Miscellanea Taurinensia. The first volume contains a paper on the theory of the propagation of sound; in this he indicates a mistake made by Newton, obtains the general differential equation for the motion, and integrates it for motion in a straight line. [12] In this Academy one of his students was FranÃ§ois Daviet.[13]. ( Of these the most important are the following: Over and above these various papers he composed his fundamental treatise, the MÃ©canique analytique. I, p.108. Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736 – 1813) Italian mathematician and astronomer. C G Fraser, Joseph Louis Lagrange's algebraic vision of the calculus. Educated at the college of Turin he prided … She died in 1783 after years of illness and Lagrange was very depressed. M Panza, The analytical foundation of mechanics of discrete systems in Lagrange's 'ThÃ©orie des fonctions analytiques', compared with Lagrange's earlier treatments of this topic II. [7][10] He was raised as a Roman Catholic (but later on became an agnostic).[11]. . Lagrange said on the death of Lavoisier: Though Lagrange had been preparing to escape from France while there was yet time, he was never in any danger; different revolutionary governments (and at a later time, Napoleon) loaded him with honours and distinctions. Astronomy. In particular, he completed Euler's work on the Diophantine equation x2 − ay2 = 1. He made a great contributions to number theory and to analytic and celestial mechanics. a sin At age 16, he began to study mathematics on his own and by age 19 was appointed to a professorship at the … [7] The French claimed he was a French mathematician, but the Italians continued to claim him as Italian.[10]. We retrace the scientific biography of Joseph-Louis Lagrange, entirely dedicated to the study of mathematics, from the time when, still adolescent, he abandoned the studies of law which were a family tradition. His treatise Theorie des fonctions analytiques laid some of the foundations of group theory, anticipating Galois. Amongst other minor theorems here given it may suffice to mention the proposition that the kinetic energy imparted by the given impulses to a material system under given constraints is a maximum, and the principle of least action. Lagrange showed that if the potential of a body at an external point were known, the attraction in any direction could be at once found. In 1795, Lagrange was appointed to a mathematical chair at the newly established Ãcole Normale, which enjoyed only a brief existence of four months. His father held a high political post under the administration of … Born at the beginning of the 18th century, this Italian-born scientist was one of the greatest minds of his time. His father Giuseppe Francesco Lodovico Lagrangia was part French and worked as Treasurer of the Office of Public Works and Fortifications i… C G Fraser, Lagrange's analytical mathematics, its Cartesian origins and reception in Comte's positive philosophy. G Julia, La vie et l'oeuvre de J.-L. Lagrange. During the years from 1772 to 1785, he contributed a long series of papers which created the science of partial differential equations. Joseph Lagrange is one of 72 scientists whose name is inscribed on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. These were all written on subjects proposed by the AcadÃ©mie franÃ§aise, and in each case the prize was awarded to him. Curiosity as to the results of the French revolution first stirred him out of his lethargy, a curiosity which soon turned to alarm as the revolution developed. Born in Turin on 25 January 1736. Fourier, who attended his lectures in 1795, wrote: In 1810, Lagrange commenced a thorough revision of the MÃ©canique analytique, but he was able to complete only about two-thirds of it before his death at Paris in 1813, in 128 rue du Faubourg Saint-HonorÃ©. BirkhÃ¤user 1990. Another treatise on the same lines was his LeÃ§ons sur le calcul des fonctions, issued in 1804, with the second edition in 1806. V Szebehely, Lagrange and the three-body problem, La 'MÃ©canique analytique' de Lagrange et son hÃ©ritage, R Taton, Lagrange et la RÃ©volution franÃ§aise, R Taton, Sur quelques piÃ¨ces de la correspondance de Lagrange pour les annÃ©es, R Taton, Le dÃ©part de Lagrange de Berlin et son installation Ã  Paris en, R Taton, Les dÃ©buts de la carriÃ¨re mathÃ©matique de Lagrange : la pÃ©riode turinoise. He studied the three-body problem for the Earth, Sun and Moon (1764) and the movement of Jupiter's satellites (1766), and in 1772 found the special-case solutions to this problem that yield what are now known as Lagrangian points. He again turned down the offer, responding that[16]:361. = Lastly, there are numerous papers on problems in astronomy. ⁡ He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1790, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1806. 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