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Joseph Louis LagrangeFrench mathematician and mechanic, foreign honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Date of Birth: 25.01.1736
Country:  France |
Content:
Biography of Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange (25.1.1736, Turin - 10.4.1813, Paris) was a French mathematician and mechanic. He was an honorary foreign member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1772).
Early Life and Education
Lagrange was born into a family of a impoverished civil servant. He independently studied mathematics and at the age of 19, he became a professor at the artillery school in Turin. In 1759, he was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and served as its president from 1766 to 1787.
Later Life and Contributions
In 1787, Lagrange moved to Paris and became a professor at the École Normale and later at the École Polytechnique. His most important works are related to the calculus of variations and analytical and theoretical mechanics. Building on the results obtained by L. Euler, he developed fundamental concepts in the calculus of variations and proposed a general analytical method (the method of variations) for solving variational problems. Lagrange aimed to establish "simple" and "universal" principles of mechanics based on the progressive ideas of 18th-century scientists, believing that only such principles could be true and correspond to objective reality.
Lagrange also made outstanding contributions to various areas of mathematical analysis, such as the remainder term formula of Taylor series, the finite increment formula, and the theory of conditional extrema. He also worked on number theory, algebra (symmetric functions of equation roots, theory and applications of continued fractions), differential equations (theory of singular solutions, the method of variation of constants), interpolation, mathematical cartography, astronomy, and more.
