Delambre

Delambre, Jean Baptiste Joseph (1749-1822), a French astronomer, born at Amiens, and educated at the college there, where the Abbe Delille made him a good scholar. He then turned his attention to astronomy, and studied under Lalande, who used to say that Delambre was his best work. In 1790 his Tables of Uranus gained the prize of the Academy, and his Tables of the Satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, published in 1791, caused his unanimous election to the Academy the next year. He was selected with another to measure the arc of the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona, a work which the war delayed, and which was not finished till 1799. He 1802 he was made chevalier of the Legion of Honour, becoming an officer in 1821. In 1803 he was appointed secretary to the Institut (now the Academy of Sciences), and in 1807 he succeeded Lalande as professor of astronomy at the College of France. Among many other works, he published five volumes of a History of Astronomy.