Legendre

Legendre, Adrien Marie (1752-1833), a French mathematician, contemporary of Laplace and Lagrange, was born at Paris, where he studied at the College Mazarin. In 1744 he contributed to his tutor's Traite de Mecanique. He was appointed professor of the Ecole Militaire, and then of the Ecole Normale, and in 1782 he obtained a prize from the Berlin Academy for a Bissertation sur la Question de Balistique. The next year he published Recherches sur la Figure des Planetes. Later he was appointed one of the commissioners for connecting Paris and Greenwich by triangutation, and was one of those employed to work out the details of the metrical system introduced by the Revolution, and to determine the length of the metre. He also published Elements of Geometry, and made discoveries in integral calculus, the method of least squares, and elliptic functions.