Abstract
Death of M. Hachette On January 16, 1834, the eminent French mathematician and engineer, Jean-Nieolas-Pierre Hachette, died in Paris at the age of sixty-four years. Born in Mezieres on May 6, 1769, he was the son of a bookseller and was educated at Charleville and Rheims. At the age of nineteen he became a draughtsman in the military engineering school at Mezieres, and four years later was made a professor of hydrography at Collioure. His mathematical writings having brought him to the notice of Monge, who then held the post of Minister of Marine in the Revolutionary Government, Hachette in 1793 was made a deputy-professor at Mezieres, and the following year at the battle of Fleurus on June 26, 1794, he assisted Guyton de Morveau in the experiment of using a balloon for military observations. A few months later, after the fall of Robespierre, he assisted Monge and Guyton de Morveau in founding the Ecole cles Travaux Publiques, renamed in 1795 the Ecole Polytechnique, and was given the chair of descriptive geometry. In 1798 with Berthollet, Monge, Fourier, Jomard and other savants he accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Once again in France, he resumed his lectures at the Ecole Polytechnique, having among his students Arago, Poisson and Fresnel. At the restoration in 1816, like Monge he was deprived of his chair and twice the Government refused to allow his election to the Academy of Sciences, which he did not enter until the Revolution of 1830. His writings comprise an admirable series of works on descriptive geometry, many reports on mathematical and physical subjects and memoirs on machines. Though his name is connected with no great discovery, his services were of great importance to constructors of machinery, and as a man he was respected for his amiability and uprightness.
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Science News a Century Ago. Nature 133, 73–74 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133073b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133073b0