Abstract
The torch now passed to a new generation of mathematicians, of whom the greatest were Joseph Louis Lagrange and Pierre Simon de Laplace. Lagrange was born in Turin in 1736. His father was very well to do and at one time controlled the Sardinian war chest. He eventually lost most of his property by speculation, so that by the time young Lagrange passed to manhood there was little of his fortune left. “If I had inherited a fortune,” Lagrange later noted, “I should probably not have cast my lot with mathematics.”1 He wrote his first important paper when he was only 19, and by the time he reached 25 had become the greatest living mathematician. “In appearance he was of medium height, and slightly formed, with pale blue eyes and a colorless complexion. In character he was nervous and timid, he detested controversy, and to avoid it willingly allowed others to take the credit for what he had himself done.”2
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Notes and References
Quoted in E. T. Bell., Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), p. 153.
W. W. Rouse Ball., A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (New York: Dover, 1960; reprint of 4th ed., 1908), p. 411.
Bell, p. 173.
The term secular is, incidentally, taken from the Latin saeculaires, occurring once in or lasting an age; ancient Roman games or festival held at long intervals.
Laplace, Mem. Acad, des Sciences, 1784.
Laplace, System of the World, Vol. II, p. 32.
Lagrange, Mém. Acad, des Sciences de Berlin, 1776.
Taton and Wilson, eds., Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part B: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46.
Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 56.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, C. F. Harrold (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1939), pp. 257–258.
Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, 56.
Ibid.
Laplace, System of the World, Vol. II, p. 35.
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© 1997 Richard Baum and William Sheehan
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Baum, R., Sheehan, W. (1997). The Celestial Decades. In: In Search of Planet Vulcan. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6100-6_5
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