Charles Dupin

Charles Dupin, lithograph by Julien Léopold Boilly

Essai historique sur les services et les travaux scientifiques de Gaspard Monge , 1819

Pierre Charles François Dupin (born October 6, 1784 in Varzy , † January 18, 1873 in Paris ) was a French mathematician, engineer and politician.

Dupin was the son of a lawyer and grew up in Nivernais . He studied with Gaspard Monge at the École polytechnique and then went on sea voyages as a marine engineer and later in Antwerp , Genoa , Toulouse (where he founded the Naval Museum in 1813) and from 1807 to 1810 in Corfu , where he renovated the naval arsenal and the port. From 1819 to 1854 he was a mathematics professor at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, where he also gave very popular public lectures, e.g. B. held on the uses of geometry in industry. In 1828 he was elected to parliament as a deputy for the Tarn department . In 1834 he became Minister of the Navy and served in the French Senate from 1852. As a politician he tried to build schools, banks, industry (especially the spread of steam power), roads and canals.

As a student, he discovered the Dupin's cyclides named after him . He introduced the Dupin indicatrix into the differential geometry of surfaces and asymptotic lines on surfaces ( Developpments de la Geometrie 1813). The set of Dupin is a statement of triple orthogonal systems of surfaces.

In 1813 he was elected to the Institut de France (the Napoleonic replacement for the French Academy) and in 1818 as a full member of the French Academy of Sciences . In 1823 he became an honorary member ( Honorary Fellow ) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1826 of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . In 1838 he was awarded the peer rating .

In 1826 he published a map on the distribution of illiteracy in France. Each district was shown in different shades depending on the frequency. This was the first choropleth map . He was inspired by the work of Georg Hassel and August Friedrich Wilhelm Crome .

His brother was the well-known lawyer André Dupin .

Individual evidence

^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 24, 2019 .
^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Pierre Charles François Dupin. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 30, 2015 (in Russian).
↑ Palsky, Gilles : "Connections and Exchanges in European Thematic Cartography The case of XIXth century Choropleth maps.." Formatting Europe. Mapping a continent. 2007.

Web links

John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Charles Dupin. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

personal data
SURNAME	Dupin, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Dupin, Pierre Charles François (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French mathematician, engineer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH	October 6, 1784
PLACE OF BIRTH	Varzy
DATE OF DEATH	January 18, 1873
Place of death	Paris

[1] Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 24, 2019 .

[2] Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Pierre Charles François Dupin. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 30, 2015 (in Russian).

[3] Palsky, Gilles : "Connections and Exchanges in European Thematic Cartography The case of XIXth century Choropleth maps.." Formatting Europe. Mapping a continent. 2007.