Adrien marie legendre biography books

Copyrights Adrien-Marie Legendre from Gale. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. Sign In. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. Temporarily Unavailable. Legendre did an impressive amount of work on elliptic functions , including the classification of elliptic integrals , but it took Abel 's study of the inverses of Jacobi 's functions to solve the problem completely.

He is known for the Legendre transformation , which is used to go from the Lagrangian to the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics. In thermodynamics it is also used to obtain the enthalpy and the Helmholtz and Gibbs free energies from the internal energy. He is also the namesake of the Legendre polynomials , solutions to Legendre's differential equation, which occur frequently in physics and engineering applications, such as electrostatics.

This text greatly rearranged and simplified many of the propositions from Euclid's Elements to create a more effective textbook. For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in , books, paintings and articles have incorrectly shown a profile portrait of the obscure French politician Louis Legendre — as a portrait of the mathematician.

The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre" and appeared in a book along with contemporary mathematicians such as Lagrange. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikisource Wikidata item. French mathematician — For other uses, see Legendre.

We have given his place of birth as Paris, as given in [ 1 ] and [ 2 ] , but there is some evidence to suggest that he was born in Toulouse and the family moved to Paris when he was very young. In the thesis he listed the literature that he would study and the results that he would be aiming to prove. With no need for employment to support himself, Legendre lived in Paris and concentrated on research.

He then decided to enter for the prize on projectiles offered by the Berlin Academy. 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.

He wrote to Laplace asking for more information about the prize winning young mathematician.

Adrien marie legendre biography books

Legendre next studied the attraction of ellipsoids. He gave a proof of a result due to Maclaurin , that the attractions at an external point lying on the principal axis of two confocal ellipsoids was proportional to their masses. He then introduced what we call today the Legendre functions and used these to determine, using power series, the attraction of an ellipsoid at any exterior point.

Over the next few years Legendre published work in a number of areas. The paper on number theory contains a number of important results such as the law of quadratic reciprocity for residues and the results that every arithmetic series with the first term coprime to the common difference contains an infinite number of primes. Of course today we attribute the law of quadratic reciprocity to Gauss and the theorem concerning primes in an arithmetic progression to Dirichlet.

This is fair since Legendre's proof of quadratic reciprocity was unsatisfactory, while he offered no proof of the theorem on primes in an arithmetic progression. However, these two results are of great importance and credit should go to Legendre for his work on them, although he was not the first to state the law of quadratic reciprocity since it occurs in Euler 's work of and also of see [ 15 ].