Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton

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Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton (born February 10, 1732 in La Baroche-Gondouin ( Département Mayenne ), † June 15, 1798 in Paris ) was a French mathematician .

Life

Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton was descended from poor parents and had very few classes until he was 18. Only then did a clergyman who became friends with him give him two years of teaching. So somewhat prepared, Paucton went to Nantes , where he studied mathematics and helmsman's studies. Then he appeared in Paris as a private tutor. The first written work through which he became known to the learned world was his Théorie de la vis d ' Archimède (Paris 1768), in which he found some useful applications of the Archimedean screw , e.g. B. in the construction of mills, and reported in an appendix investigations into the strength of wood. This work is actually the further version of a treatise that he had sent in 1765 to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin for a question asked by them, but without receiving the award. Paucton's work deserves to be compared with the remarks that Daniel Bernoulli made in his Hydrodynamik , Leonhard Euler in the fifth volume of the Novi Commentarii Academiae Petropolitanae and the Jesuit Belgrado in a treatise on the same subject printed in Parma in 1767 .

In 1780 Paucton published a larger work under the title Métrologie, ou traité des mesures, poids et monnaies des anciens peuples et des Moderne zu Paris, which served as the basis for many later works of similar content and, in the 19th century, along with so many since the introduction of the general and special metrologies that appeared in the metric system retained its value. A year later, Paucton's Théorie des lois de la nature, ou la science des causes et des effects appeared in Paris , in which the views on the communication of the movement suggested by Leibniz in a paper against the Cartesians are further elaborated. At the end of this work is a dissertation sur les pyramides d'Égypte , in which Paucton seeks to show that the theory contained in the above writing was already known to the Egyptian priests and was expressed by them in a mysterious shell on those ancient monuments. Jean-Étienne Montucla , who, as censor, had read the draft of this highly demanding work, saw it as just an algebraic Galimathia . Mauduit judges it less strictly, but does not fully agree with the author.

Paucton's external position was only improved by the above-mentioned scholarly work in that it provided him with a mathematics apprenticeship in Strasbourg . He soon had to give up this, however, because when the Austrians approached Strasbourg he did not have the means to provide enough provisions for himself, his wife and his three children for a feared blockade of the city. He then retired to Dole , where he taught mathematics in a boarding school for an annual salary of 600 livres . From there, the Minister of the Interior appointed him to a position in the land registry on November 22, 1796 as a computer at the Connaissance des temps . So Paucton came back to Paris and was appointed a corresponding member of the institute . In 1796 he also became a member of the Académie des sciences . He had received financial support of 3,000 francs from the National Convention and now seemed to be looking forward to a more pleasant future, but already on June 15, 1798, he died. Among the writings he left behind was a translation of the Orphic Hymns , a work on gnomonics and a theory of the flying chariot (pterophore), the first ideas of which are already given in his Théorie de la vis d'Archimède .

literature

Remarks

  1. This date of birth is given by Johann Samuelansch ; According to Foisset the Elder , Paucton was born in 1736 in the biography universelle .
  2. List of members since 1666: Letter P. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 1, 2020 (French).