Pierre-Simon Laplace

@Mathematicians, Timeline and Childhood

Pierre-Simon Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer

Mar 23, 1749

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Biography

Personal Details

  • Birthday: March 23, 1749
  • Died on: March 5, 1827
  • Nationality: French
  • Famous: Scientists, Mathematicians, Astronomers
  • Spouses: Marie-Charlotte de Courty de Romanges
  • Known as: Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace
  • Universities:
    • University of Caen Lower Normandy

Pierre-Simon Laplace born at

Beaumont-en-Auge

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Birth Place

In March 1788, he married Marie-Charlotte de Courty de Romanges, a girl from Besançon who was twenty years younger to him. The couple had a son, Charles-Émile, and a daughter, Sophie-Suzanne.

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Personal Life

Pierre-Simon Laplace died on March 5, 1827, in Paris, France, at the age of 77. After he died, his physician, François Magendie, removed Laplace’s brain which was later displayed in a roving anatomical museum in Britain.

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Personal Life

Pierre-Simon Laplace was born on March 23, 1749, in Beaumont-en-Auge, a village in Normandy, France, to Pierre de Laplace, owner of small farms of Maarquis, and his wife, Marie-Anne Sochon.

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Childhood & Early Life

Despite his family’s poor financial condition, Laplace was able to receive a good education courtesy his wealthy neighbors. His father wanted him to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church and thus sent him to Caen University to study theology at the age of 16. But, Laplace developed a keen interest in mathematics.

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Childhood & Early Life

At the age of 19, he dropped out of college and moved to Paris where he worked as a professor of mathematics at the École Militaire from 1769 to 1776. During this time, he published several papers regarding integral calculus, mechanics and physical astronomy, which gained him much acclaim all over France.

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Childhood & Early Life

In 1771, his early published work focused on differential equations and finite differences. Subsequently, he started to think about the mathematical and philosophical concepts of probability and statistics.

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Career

In 1774, his paper titled ‘Mémoire sur la probabilité des causes par les événements’ was published. Two years later, he published another paper which further elaborated his statistical thinking and also began his systematic work on celestial mechanics and the stability of the solar system.

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Career

During 1784–87, he worked on the subject of attraction between spheroids which laid the mathematical foundation for the scientific study of heat, magnetism, and electricity.

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Career

In 1796, he published ‘Exposition du système du monde (The System of the World)’, which included his ‘nebular hypothesis’.

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Career

Between 1799 and 1825, he published five volumes of ‘Traité de mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics)’, which summarized the results obtained by his mathematical development and application of the law of gravitation.

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Career

Pierre-Simon Laplace is highly regarded for his influential five-volume treatise ‘Traité de mécanique céleste’ (Celestial mechanics; 1799-1825), which developed a strong mathematical understanding of the motion of the heavenly bodies. He established that the small perturbations observed in the orbital motion of the planets will always remain small, constant and self-correcting.

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Major Works

He formulated Laplace's equation, and pioneered the Laplace transform which appears in many branches of mathematical physics. The Laplacian differential operator, widely used in mathematics, is also named after him.

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Major Works