Gaspard Monge
Gaspard Monge | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 28 July 1818 Paris, France | (aged 72)
Resting place | Père Lachaise Cemetery |
Nationality | French |
Known for | Descriptive geometry Transportation theory |
Scientific career | |
Fields | mathematics, engineering, education |
Notable students | Jean-Baptiste Biot[1] Charles Dupin Sylvestre François Lacroix Jean-Victor Poncelet[1] |
Signature | |
Gaspard Monge, Comte de
Biography
Early life
Monge was born at Beaune, Côte-d'Or, the son of a merchant. He was educated at the college of the Oratorians at Beaune.[5] In 1762 he went to the Collège de la Trinité at Lyon, where, one year after he had begun studying, he was made a teacher of physics[5] at the age of just seventeen.[7]
After finishing his education in 1764 he returned to Beaune, where he made a large-scale plan of the town, inventing the methods of observation and constructing the necessary instruments; the plan was presented to the town, and is still preserved in their
Career
Those studying at the officer school were exclusively drawn from the aristocracy, so he was not allowed admission to the institution itself. His manual skill was highly regarded, but his mathematical skills were not made use of. Nevertheless, he worked on the development of his ideas in his spare time. At this time he came to contact with Charles Bossut, the professor of mathematics at the École Royale du Génie. "I was a thousand times tempted," he said long afterwards, "to tear up my drawings in disgust at the esteem in which they were held, as if I had been good for nothing better."[5]
After a year at the École Royale, Monge was asked to produce a plan for a fortification in such a way as to optimise its defensive arrangement. There was an established method for doing this which involved lengthy calculations but Monge devised a way of solving the problems by using drawings. At first his solution was not accepted, since it had not taken the time judged to be necessary, but upon examination the value of the work was recognised,[5] and Monge's exceptional abilities were recognised.
After Bossut left the École Royale du Génie, Monge took his place in January 1769, and in 1770 he was also appointed instructor in experimental physics.[7]
In 1777, Monge married Cathérine Huart, who owned a forge. This led Monge to develop an interest in metallurgy. In 1780 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences; his friendship with chemist C. L. Berthollet began at this time.[5] In 1783, after leaving Mézières, he was, on the death of É. Bézout, appointed examiner of naval candidates.[5] Although pressed by the minister to prepare a complete course of mathematics, he declined to do so on the grounds that this would deprive Mme Bézout of her only income, that from the sale of the textbooks written by her late husband.[5] In 1786 he wrote and published his Traité élémentaire de la statique.[5]
1789 and after
The
He took a very active part in the measures for the establishment of the
From May 1796 to October 1797 Monge was in
From there Monge joined
Napoleon Bonaparte stated Monge was an
A statue portraying him was erected in Beaune in 1849. Monge's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the base of the Eiffel Tower.
Since 4 November 1992 the
Work
Between 1770 and 1790 Monge contributed various papers on mathematics and physics to the Memoirs of the Academy of Turin, the Mémoires des savantes étrangers of the Academy of Paris, the Mémoires of the same Academy, and the
Leonhard Euler, in his 1760 paper on curvature in the Berlin Memoirs, had considered, not the normals of the surface, but the normals of the plane sections through a particular normal, so that the question of the intersection of successive normals of the surface had never presented itself to him.[5] Monge's paper gives the ordinary differential equation of the curves of curvature, and establishes the general theory in a very satisfactory manner; the application to the interesting particular case of the ellipsoid was first made by him in a later paper in 1795.[5]
Monge's 1781 memoir is also the earliest known anticipation of
Another of his papers in the volume for 1783 relates to the production of water by the combustion of hydrogen. Monge's results had been anticipated by Henry Cavendish.[5] It was also in this time, from 1783 - 1784, that Monge worked with (Jean-François, Jean-Baptiste-Paul-Antoine, or Abbé Pierre-Romain) Clouet to liquefy sulfur dioxide by passing a stream of the gas through a U-tube sunken in a refrigerant mixture of ice and salt.[12] This made them the first to liquefy a pure gas.[13]
Selected publications
- 1781: Mémoire sur la théorie des déblais et des remblais De l'Imprimerie Royale.
- 1793: (with Claude-Louis Berthollet) Avis aux ouvriers en fer, sur la fabrication de l'acier. Tome 8(Advice to ironworkers, on the manufacture of steel)
- 1794: Description de l'art de fabriquer des canons (Description of the art of making cannon)
- 1795: Application d'analyse à la géométrie
- 1799: Géométrie descriptive. Leçons données aux écoles normales (Descriptive Geometry)
- 1807: Application de l'analyse à la géométrie, à l'usage de l'Ecole impériale polytechnique.
- 1810: (with Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette) Traité élémentaire de statique, a l'usage des écoles de la Marine, chez Courcier, Imprimeur-libraire, pour les mathematiques, quai des Augustins, 1852 translation: An elementary treatise on statics.
See also
References
- ^ a b Sooyoung Chang, Academic Genealogy of Mathematicians, World Scientific, 2010, p. 93.
- ^ "Registres paroissiaux et/ou d'état civil : 16 janvier 1745 – 1746" [Parish and/or civil registers: January 16, 1745 – 1746] (in French). Archives of the Department of Côte-d'Or. p. 174/281. FRAD021EC 57/044. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
- ^ "Monfredy (1845) to Mongé (1831)", Fichiers de l'état civil reconstitué [Reconstituted files of civil status] (in French), Paris Archives, p. 44/51, V3E/D 1076, retrieved 8 May 2018
- ^ Albrecht Dürer and Guarino Guarini published works establishing the field before Monge.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Arthur Cayley (1911). . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 18 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 709–710.
- ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gaspard Monge", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- ^ a b c J.J., O'Connor and; Robertson, E.F. "Gaspard Monge". School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Retrieved 26 March 2012.
- LCCN 57003475.
- ^ Alain Queruel, Les franc-maçons de l'Expédition d'Egypte (Editions du Cosmogone, 2012). Snezana Lawrence et Mark McCartney, Mathematicians and their Gods : Interactions between mathematics and religious beliefs (OUP Oxford, 2015). Emmanuel Pierrat et Laurent Kupferman, Le Paris des Francs-Maçons (Le Cherche Midi, 2013)
- Lagrange believed in God. But they did not like to say so." Baron Gaspard Gourgaud, Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena with General Baron Gourgaud (1904), page 274.
- ISBN 9780688014797.
Yet, sailing to Egypt, he had lain on deck, asking his scientists whether the planets were inhabited, how old the Earth was, and whether it would perish by fire or by flood. Many, like his friend Gaspard Monge, the first man to liquefy a gas, were atheists.
- JSTOR 23905084.
- ^ Wisniak, Jaime (2003). "Louis Paul Cailletet—The liquefaction of the permanent gases" (PDF).
External links
- Media related to Gaspard Monge at Wikimedia Commons
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gaspard Monge", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- An Elementary Treatise on Statics with a Biographical Notice of the Author (Biddle, Philadelphia, 1851).
- An elementary treatise on descriptive geometry, with a theory of shadows and of perspective (Weale, London, 1851).
- Géométrie descriptive. Leçons données aux Écoles normales, l'an 3 de la République; Par Gaspard Monge, de l'Institut national (Baudouin, Paris, 1798)
- Portrait of Gaspard Monge from the Lick Observatory Records Digital Archive, UC Santa Cruz Library's Digital Collections Archived 6 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine
- Gaspard Monge (1789) "Mémoire sur quelques phenomenes de la vision." Archived 6 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine Annales de Chimie. Ser. 1, bk. 3 p. 131–147 – digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library
- New International Encyclopedia. 1905. .