Adrien marie legendre biography of martin luther

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He applied his methods to the data known for two comets. He wrote to Laplace asking for more information about the prize winning young mathematician.

On 13 May 1791 Legendre became a member of the committee of the Académie des Sciences with the task to standardise weights and measures. Of course today we attribute the law of quadratic reciprocity to Gauss and the theorem concerning primes in an arithmetic progression to Dirichlet.

However, despite spending 40 years working on elliptic functions, Legendre never gained the insight of Jacobi and Abel and the independent work of these two mathematicians was making Legendre's new three volume work obsolete almost as soon as it was published.

Legendre published a book on determining the orbits of comets in 1806.

His contributions to number theory, geometry, statistics, and the theory of elliptic functions were crucial in shaping the development of modern mathematics.

Influence on Future Mathematicians

Legendre’s work influenced many of the greatest mathematicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Carl Friedrich Gauss, Niels Henrik Abel, and Carl Gustav Jacobi.

all failed because he always relied, in the last analysis, on propositions that were "evident" from the Euclidean point of view. In 1832(the year Bolyai published his work on non-euclidean geometry) Legendre confirmed his absolute belief in Euclidean space when he wrote:-

It is nevertheless certain that the theorem on the sum of the three angles of the triangle should be considered one of those fundamental truths that are impossible to contest and that are an enduring example of mathematical certitude.

In 1824 Legendre refused to vote for the government's candidate for the Institut National.

Gauss was correct, but one could understand how hurtful Legendre must have found an attack on the rigour of his results by such a young man.

In 1770, at the age of 18, Legendre defended his thesis in mathematics and physics at the Collège Mazarin but this was not quite as grand an achievement as it sounds to us today, for this consisted more of a plan of research rather than a completed thesis.

More results on beta and gamma functions appeared in the second volume together with applications of his results to mechanics, the rotation of the Earth, the attraction of ellipsoids and other problems. Abel wrote in October 1826:-

Legendre is an extremely amiable man, but unfortunately as old as the stones.

As a result of Legendre's refusal to vote for the government's candidate in 1824 his pension was stopped and he died in poverty.

He certainly came from a wealthy family and he was given a top quality education in mathematics and physics at the Collège Mazarin in Paris.

Over the next few years Legendre published work in a number of areas. The actual task was stated as follows:-

Determine the curve described by cannonballs and bombs, taking into consideration the resistance of the air; give rules for obtaining the ranges corresponding to different initial velocities and to different angles of projection.

His essay Recherches sur la trajectoire des projectiles dans les milieux résistantsⓉ won the prize and launched Legendre on his research career.

Legendre's major work on elliptic functions in Exercices du Calcul IntégralⓉ appeared in three volumes in 1811, 1817, and 1819.