Alexis-Claude Clairaut

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Alexis-Claude Clairaut; portrait

Alexis-Claude Clairaut (born  May 3, 1713 in Paris , †  May 17, 1765 in Paris) was a French mathematician , geodesist and physicist .

Life

Alexis-Claude Clairaut was the second of 20 children of the mathematician and professor at the Paris University of Jean-Baptiste Clairaut . In 1744 he was accepted as a foreign member of what was then the Royal Prussian Society of Sciences . He was the only one of his siblings who reached adulthood - a younger brother who died at the age of 16 in 1732, but was also mathematically gifted at an early age and submitted a thesis to the Paris Academy at the age of fourteen. Alexis-Claude Clairaut had already made such great progress in mathematics at the age of 13 that he was able to submit a thesis to the Paris Académie des Sciences on the graphical doubling of a cube. Around 1728 he exchanged extensive scientific letters with Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon .

At the age of 18 he was admitted as a member of the academy with a special permit from the king, after his treatise on novel spatial curves, completed in 1729, had been enthusiastically received. To this day, he is the youngest member ever to be admitted to the Paris Academy. He made friends with Pierre Louis Maupertuis , Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet , all of whom were followers of Newton's theory of gravitation, which at that time still met resistance in France.

Clairaut was involved in Madame du Châtelet's translation of Newton's major work Principia into French, and many of his own results were published therein. In 1734 he spent a few months in Basel with Maupertuis to study with one of the leading continental European mathematicians, Johann I Bernoulli . There he made friends with Johann Samuel König .

In 1736 he took part with Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in the Lapland expedition, which was undertaken to determine the ideal shape of the earth's surface - the earth's ellipsoid . Clairaut's theoretical evaluation led to his work Theory of the Earth Shape According to the Laws of Hydrostatics (1743), which became a classic of geodesy . These investigations into possible equilibrium figures led him more and more to astronomy . Here he took on the three-body problem , the approximate solution of which he submitted to the Académie des sciences in 1747.

Clairaut calculated Comet Halley's return to be in 1759 ( Edmond Halley had predicted the return in 1758). From the one month difference between the observation and his calculations, he concluded that there was a disturbance by an unknown body beyond Saturn . This body was discovered as Uranus by Wilhelm Herschel in 1781 (albeit by chance) .

He published new types of textbooks on geometry and algebra , which did not approach the topics axiomatically , but heuristically . Three equations that play a major role in geodesy are named after him:

The moon crater Clairaut and the asteroid (9592) Clairaut are named after him.

Fonts

See also

Web links

Commons : Alexis Clairault  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members of the previous academies. Alexis-Claude Clairaut. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 9, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Chronology de la vie de Clairaut (1713-1765)
personal data
SURNAME Clairaut, Alexis-Claude
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1713
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 17, 1765
Place of death Paris