Abstract
As stated in our issue of January 4, on January 25 occurs the bicentenary of the birth of the celebrated French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, a senator of France, a grand officer of the Legion of Honour and a count of the Empire. A born student, Lagrange was gentle and timid in manner, reserved in society, detested controversy, and for the greater part of his life was never in really robust health. Yet by the methodical use of his time and the exercise of his genius, he accomplished an amount of work, seldom, if ever, exceeded by any individual, while his “Mecanique Analytique” has been called one of the most remarkable monuments of human genius. To Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the “Mecanique Analytique” was “a scientific poem”. The first thirty years of the life of Lagrange were passed in Turin, his birthplace; the next twenty years in Berlin and the last twenty-seven in Paris. As a young man he set out to visit London, but his journey was interrupted by sickness. He was the correspondent or associate of many of the greatest Continental men of science, such as Euler, D'Alem-bert, Clairaut, Legendre, Laplace, Borda, Berthollet and de Morveau, and it was the last who, when in October 1793 a decree banished all persons not born in France, secured special exemption for Lagrange so that he might complete some calculations on the theory of projectiles.
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Bicentenary of Lagrange, 1736–1813. Nature 137, 141–142 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137141c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137141c0