Joseph Gergonne
Joseph Diez Gergonne (born June 19, 1771 in Nancy , † May 4, 1859 in Montpellier ) was a French mathematician.
Gergonne was the son of a painter and architect. He attended school in Nancy. In 1792 he went to the Revolutionary Wars as one of the many volunteers and was u. a. at the victory of the French revolutionary army in the cannonade of Valmy . After a short time in Paris in 1793 he was secretary in the general staff of the French Moselle Army. After attending the artillery school for a month, he became a lieutenant and in 1794 went to Spain with the French army, where he was present during the conquest of Figueres . After the separate peace with the Prussians in 1795, he left the army, became a professor of mathematics in Nimes and married. In 1810 he founded the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées , called " Annales de Gergonne ". They existed until 1832, and here published u. a. Jean-Victor Poncelet , Michel Chasles , Jakob Steiner , Julius Plücker and Évariste Galois . In 1816 he became an astronomy professor in Montpellier. In 1830 he became rector there and retired in 1844. In 1830 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In 1832 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .
Gergonne himself was mainly concerned with geometry . From him comes the word polar in projective geometry , and he introduced the principle of duality there (from 1810, especially 1824 to 1827). He noticed that propositions of plane projective geometry could be converted into one another by exchanging the terms point and straight line. He also gave an elegant solution to Apollonius' problem (construction of a circle touching three given circles) in 1816 . In the triangular geometry , the Gergonne point is named after him.
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Joseph Gergonne. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Individual evidence
- ^ List of members since 1666: Letter G. Académie des sciences, accessed on November 18, 2019 (French).
- ^ Members of the previous academies. Joseph Diez Gergonne. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 28, 2015 .
- ↑ Peter Baptist: Historical Notes on Gergonne and Nagel Point. In: Sudhoffs Archiv 71, 1987, 2, pp. 230-233
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gergonne, Joseph |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gergonne, Joseph Diaz (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 19, 1771 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nancy |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 4, 1859 |
| Place of death | Montpellier |