Charles Bossut

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Charles Bossut

Charles Bossut (born August 11, 1730 in Tartaras , † January 14, 1814 in Paris ) was a French mathematician and engineer and an expert in hydrodynamics .

life and work

Bossut lost his father at an early age and grew up with his uncle. At fourteen he attended the Jesuit college in Lyon, where he had the same mathematics teacher Père Bèraud as Jean-Étienne Montucla , who was five years older, and Jérôme Lalande two years younger . After receiving the minor orders to Abbé , he continued his mathematics studies in contact with Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert (Bossut was one of his few students), Charles Étienne Louis Camus and Alexis-Claude Clairaut . In 1753 he became a corresponding member of the Academie des Sciences under the influence of d'Alembert. In 1752 he became a mathematics professor at the Pioneer School (École du Génie) in Mézières , which had been founded in 1748 (it was later moved to Metz by Lazare Carnot , who also studied there ). Among his students there were Charles Augustin de Coulomb and Jean-Charles de Borda . His successor was Gaspard Monge in 1769 , who came to the engineering academy as a draftsman and surveyor in 1765. Bossut had encouraged him in his first work on the evolution of curves, published in 1769 . Bossut remained, even after he gave up his chair in 1768 (as an academician he was independent and had to be in Paris), the school's examiner until 1794. In 1774, the finance minister Anne Robert Jacques created Turgot at the suggestion of the Marquis de Condorcet, who was friends with him and Bossut a chair in hydrodynamics at the Louvre in Paris, which Bossut held until 1780. He was also an examiner at the École Polytechnique .

In 1762 he won the Academy’s Grand Prize with an essay on the hypothetical fluid resistance of the planets during orbit around the sun (this was part of the dynamics of René Descartes and Isaac Newton also dealt with the resistance of bodies in fluids in the Principia) and he also won the Academy Award in 1761 and 1765 (alone or with others) and awards from the Lyons and Toulouse Academies. He took part in experiments on fluid resistance with d'Alembert and Condorcet in 1775.

At that time he was known in France for various textbooks on mechanics and mathematics. Bossut also published the works of Blaise Pascal in five volumes in 1779 (published in The Hague). He worked on the mathematical part of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers under d´Alembert and Denis Diderot and contributed to the Encyclopédie méthodique . In 1802 his history of mathematics appeared, but it did not come close to that of Montucla.

He was a member of the academies in Turin, Bologna, Göttingen (since 1766) and St. Petersburg.

His biographer Gillmor describes him as little important as a mathematician or physicist, but his textbooks were widespread. He never married and is said to have avoided contacts in the end.

Fonts

  • Traité élémentaire de méchanique et de dinamique appliqué principalement aux mouvements des machines. Charleville 1763.
  • Traité élémentaire d'hydrodynamique. 1771.
  • Traité théorique et expérimental d'hydrodynamique. 1786, 1787.
  • Traité élémentaire de méchanique statique. 1772.
  • Course complet de mathématiques. 1765, 1781.
  • Mécanique en général. 1792.
  • Essai sur l'histoire générale des mathématiques. 2 volumes, 1802.
  • Mémoires de mathématiques, concernant la navigation, l'astronomie physique, l'histoire… by Charles Bossut. Paris, 1812. (collected essays)

literature

  • C. Stewart Gillmor: Bossut, Charles . in Dictionary of Scientific Biography .
  • ME Doublet: L'abbé Bossut . in: Bulletin des sciences mathématiques. 2nd Series, Vol. 38, 1914, pp. 93-96, 121-125, 158-160, 186-190, 220-224.
  • Jean-Baptiste Joseph Delambre : Obituary in Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences de l'Institute de France, for the year 1816. Volume 1, 1818, pp. Xci-cii.
  • René Taton (ed.): Enseignement et diffusion des sciences en France au XVIIIe siècle , Paris, 1964
  • Roger Hahn: The Chair of Hydrodynamics in Paris, 1775–1791; A Creation of Turgot. in: Acts of the Xth International Congress of the History of Science (Ithaca). Paris, 1964, pp. 751-754.
  • René Dugas : A History of Mechanics . Neuchâtel, 1955, pp. 313-316.
  • Thomas F. Mulcrone, SJ: A Note on the Mathematician Abbé Charles Bossut. Bulletin, American Association of Jesuit Scientists, Vol. 42, 1965, pp. 16-19.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 46.
personal data
SURNAME Bossut, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French engineer and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1730
PLACE OF BIRTH Tartaras
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1814
Place of death Paris