Michel Chasles

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Michel Chasles
Chasles' signature on the Eiffel Tower (center)

Michel Chasles (born November 15, 1793 in Épernon , †  December 18, 1880 in Paris ) was a French mathematician .

Life

Chasles attended the École polytechnique in Paris between 1812 and 1814 and then lived in Chartres , where he was busy with mathematical studies. Here he had been a professor since 1825, then in 1841 he was appointed professor of geodesy and mechanical engineering at the École Polytechnique in Paris. At the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1846 he was given a special chair for higher geometry . In 1839 he became a corresponding and in 1851 a full member of the institute.

Chasles is one of the founders of the so-called newer geometry, the géométrie nouvelle, which tried to solve the most demanding geometric problems without the aid of algebra .

A dispute over manuscripts that broke out in 1867 through communications from Chasle caused a lot of stir . Chasles claimed to be in possession of letters from Galileo , Pascal, and Newton , from which it emerged that the great discoveries ascribed to Newton were due to Pascal. Chasles stuck to the authenticity of these forged manuscripts by Denis Vrain-Lucas until a court case in 1869 proved that they were forged. Chasles had become the victim of fraudsters, from whom he even bought letters from Cleopatra to Caesar, which were written in French.

In his Aperçu Historique (1837), in which he mixed historical and his own geometric studies, he presented a. a. Euclid (Porism) as the forerunner of projective geometry. He also tried to reconstruct the difficult-to-understand works of Gérard Desargues . In 1843, in a History of Arithmetic, he argued that the decimal system went back to Pythagoras (instead of the Indian).

His name is immortalized on the Eiffel Tower, see: The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower . In 1873 he was the first president of the Société Mathématique de France .

In 1839 he became a corresponding and in 1851 a full member of the Académie des sciences . In 1854 he was elected a foreign member ("Foreign Member") of the Royal Society and in 1858 a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . In 1861 he was admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and in 1864 to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences .

The asteroid (18510) Chasles was named after him.

Fonts

  • Aperçu historique sur l'origine et le dévéloppement des méthodes en géométrie. ( 1837 ).
  • Traité de géométrie supérieure. ( 1852 ).
  • Traité de sections coniques. Vol. 1 ( 1865 ).
  • Report on the progress of the geometry. ( 1871 ).

literature

  • Dauben, Scriba: Writing the history of mathematics. Birkhäuser.
  • Koppelmann: Article Chasles in Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 1970 ff.
  • Steven Kleiman : Chasles's enumerative theory of conics: a historical introduction. In: Studies in algebraic geometry. Washington, DC, 1980, pp. 117-138.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ K.-R. Biermann, I. Schwarz: Forged Humboldt. In: uni-potsdam.de. Retrieved December 29, 2019 .
  2. ^ JJ O'Connor, EF Robertson: The mathematician and the forger. In: mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk. April 2003, accessed December 29, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Les membres du passé dont le nom commence par C. In: academie-sciences.fr. Retrieved December 29, 2019 (French).
  4. ^ Historical academy members. Michel Chasles. In: bbaw.de. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on December 29, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Chasles, Michel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH Epernon
DATE OF DEATH December 18, 1880
Place of death Paris