Adrien-Marie Legendre
| Adrien-Marie Legendre | |
|---|---|
1820 watercolor caricature of Adrien-Marie Legendre by French artist Julien-Leopold Boilly (see portrait debacle), the only existing portrait known
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| Born |
18 September 1752 Paris, France |
| Died | 10 January 1833 (aged 80) Paris, France |
| Residence | France |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions |
École Militaire École Normale École Polytechnique |
| Alma mater | Collège Mazarin |
| Known for | Legendre transformation, Legendre polynomials and elliptic functions |
Adrien-Marie Legendre (French: [adʁiɛ̃ maʁi ləʒɑ̃ːdʁ]; 18 September 1752 – 10 January 1833) was a French mathematician. Legendre made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him.
Adrien-Marie Legendre was born in Paris on 18 September 1752 to a wealthy family. He received his education at the Collège Mazarin in Paris, and defended his thesis in physics and mathematics in 1770. He taught at the École Militaire in Paris from 1775 to 1780 and at the École Normale from 1795. At the same time, he was associated with the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1782, the Berlin Academy awarded Legendre a prize for his treatise on projectiles in resistant media. This treatise also brought him to the attention of Lagrange.
The Académie des Sciences made Legendre an adjoint member in 1783 and an associé in 1785. In 1789 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He assisted with the Anglo-French Survey (1784–1790) to calculate the precise distance between the Paris Observatory and the Royal Greenwich Observatory by means of trigonometry. To this end in 1787 he visited Dover and London together with Dominique, comte de Cassini and Pierre Méchain. The three also visited William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus.
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