Joseph Diez Gergonne | |
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| Born | (1771-06-19)19 June 1771 Nancy, France |
| Died | 4 May 1859(1859-05-04) (aged 87) Montpellier, France |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics Logic |
Joseph Diez Gergonne (19 June 1771 atNancy,France – 4 May 1859 atMontpellier, France) was a Frenchmathematician andlogician.
In 1791, Gergonne enlisted in the French army as a captain. That army was undergoing rapid expansion because the French government feared a foreign invasion intended to undo theFrench Revolution and restoreLouis XVI to the throne of France. He saw action in the majorbattle of Valmy on 20 September 1792. He then returned to civilian life but soon was called up again and took part in the French invasion of Spain in 1794.
In 1795, Gergonne and his regiment were sent toNîmes. At this point, he made a definitive transition to civilian life by taking up the chair of "transcendental mathematics" at the new École centrale. He came under the influence ofGaspard Monge, the Director of the newÉcole polytechnique inParis.
In 1810, in response to difficulties he encountered in trying to publish his work, Gergonne founded his own mathematics journal, officially named theAnnales de mathématiques pures et appliquées but generally referred to as theAnnales de Gergonne. The most common subject of articles in his journal wasgeometry, Gergonne's specialty. Over a period of 22 years, theAnnales de Gergonne published about 200 articles by Gergonne himself, and other articles by many distinguished mathematicians, includingPoncelet,Servois,Bobillier,Steiner,Plücker,Chasles,Brianchon,Dupin,Lamé, evenGalois.
Gergonne was appointed to the chair of astronomy at the University of Montpellier in 1816. In 1830, he was appointedRector of the University of Montpellier, at which time he ceased publishing his journal. He retired in 1844.
Gergonne was among the first mathematicians to employ the wordpolar. In a series of papers beginning in 1810, he contributed to elaborating theprinciple of duality inprojective geometry, by noticing that everytheorem in theplane connecting points and lines corresponds to another theorem in which points and lines are interchanged, provided that the theorem embodied no metrical notions. Gergonne was an early proponent of the techniques ofanalytical geometry and in 1814, he devised an elegant coordinate solution to the classicalproblem of Apollonius: to find a circle which touches three given circles, thus demonstrating the power of the new methods.
In 1813, Gergonne wrote the prize-winning essay for the Bordeaux Academy,Methods of synthesis and analysis in mathematics, unpublished to this day and known only via a summary. The essay is very revealing of Gergonne's philosophical ideas. He called for the abandonment of the wordsanalysis andsynthesis, claiming they lacked clear meanings. Surprisingly for a geometer, he suggested that algebra is more important than geometry at a time whenalgebra consisted almost entirely of the elementary algebra of thereal field. He predicted that one day quasi-mechanical methods would be used to discover new results.
In 1815, Gergonne wrote the first paper on theoptimal design ofexperiments forpolynomial regression. According toS. M. Stigler, Gergonne is the pioneer ofoptimal design as well asresponse surface methodology.
He published his "Essai sur la théorie des définitions" (An essay on the theory of definition) in hisAnnales in 1818. This essay is generally credited for first recognizing and naming the construct ofimplicit definition.[1][2]
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