No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
Pierre-Simon De Laplace was born on 23rd March, 1749, at Beaumont-en-Auge, a village four miles west of Pont l’Évêque in Normandy. As its name would suggest, it stands on high ground : and from an old Benedictine Priory where Laplace went to school, only a stone's throw from this birthplace, there is in fine weather a superb panorama, reaching to the English Channel seven miles away.
The original documents relating to Laplace's life have almost all perished in quite recent times: most of them as a result of a fire which in 1925 destroyed the château of Saint-Julien de Mailloc, near Lisieux, the home of his great-great-grandson the Comte de Colbert-Laplace : some had been destroyed earlier, when his house at Arcueil near Paris was looted by housebreakers in 1871 : and some were lost very recently in the bombardment of Caen. This is the more regrettable, because many of the statements regarding Laplace in the histories of mathematics are false. His father, Pierre de Laplace, owned and farmed the small estate of Mérisier near Beaumont, and held the office of Syndic of the parish. When Laplace became a Marquis, it was the fashion to regard him as having risen from a very humble origin: but the fact was that he came of a country family of good social standing One of his father's brothers was a priest and one a surgeon, and his greatuncle, Maître Olivier de Laplace, had held the title of Chirurgien Royal.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1949
References
page 1 of note * The Abbé Simon, Président des Sociétés Historiques de Normandie, writes “Les de Laplace étaient originaires de Bourgeauville, où nous les troux ons fixés au début de XVIIe siècle. I1s y font figure de notables. Ils appartiennent à cette bonne bourgeoisie terrienne qui s’unissait si souvent par des mariages à la petite noblesse locale”.
page 2 of note * Mém. de l’Acad., 1772, p.267.
page 4 of note * Mém. des Savans étrang., 7(1776). Read, Feb. 10, 1773.
page 4 of note † Mém. de l’Acad., 1781, p.1.
page 5 of note * References relating to the matter will be found in the last chapter of my book Analytical Dynamics.
page 7 of note * J. de l’Éc. Polyt., 1798: see also Méc. Cél., book ii, ch. 7
page 7 of note † It was presented to the Academy on March 19, 1787: Mém. de l’Acad., 1786, p. 235 (published 1788).
page 9 of note * Mém. de l’Acad., 1782 (published 1785), 113.
page 9 of note † The Legendre functions are given explicitly, loc. cit. p. 138: the differential equation for the Legendre and associated Legendre functions on p. 137
page 9 of note ‡ Annales de Chim., 3 (1816), 238.
page 9 of note § Mém. de l’Acad., 1780 (published 1784), 355.
page 10 of note * Mém. par divers Savans, 6 (1774), 621.
page 10 of note † Bayes died in 1761: his papers were published posthumously in Phil. Trans. 53 (1763) and 54 (1764).
page 11 of note * The Nebular Hypothesis was published in 1796, at the end of the Exposition du système du Monde.
page 12 of note * Cf. Nature, 119 (1927), 493.