51 Facts About Joseph-Louis Lagrange

Joseph-Louis Lagrange made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.

In 1766, on the recommendation of Leonhard Euler and d'Alembert, Lagrange succeeded Euler as the director of mathematics at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, Prussia, where he stayed for over twenty years, producing many volumes of work and winning several prizes of the French Academy of Sciences.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange remained in France until the end of his life.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was instrumental in the decimalisation process in Revolutionary France, became the first professor of analysis at the Ecole Polytechnique upon its opening in 1794, was a founding member of the Bureau des Longitudes, and became Senator in 1799.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange extended the method to include possible constraints, arriving at the method of Lagrange multipliers.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange invented the method of solving differential equations known as variation of parameters, applied differential calculus to the theory of probabilities and worked on solutions for algebraic equations.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange proved that every natural number is a sum of four squares.

In calculus, Joseph-Louis Lagrange developed a novel approach to interpolation and Taylor's theorem.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange studied the three-body problem for the Earth, Sun and Moon and the movement of Jupiter's satellites, and in 1772 found the special-case solutions to this problem that yield what are now known as Lagrangian points.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange is best known for transforming Newtonian mechanics into a branch of analysis, Lagrangian mechanics.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange presented the mechanical "principles" as simple results of the variational calculus.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange always thought out the subject of his papers before he began to compose them, and usually wrote them straight off without a single erasure or correction.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange's paternal great-grandfather was a French captain of cavalry, whose family originated from the French region of Tours.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange's father, Giuseppe Francesco Lodovico, was a doctor in Law at the University of Torino, while his mother was the only child of a rich doctor of Cambiano, in the countryside of Turin.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange studied at the University of Turin and his favourite subject was classical Latin.

Charles Emmanuel III appointed Joseph-Louis Lagrange to serve as the "Sostituto del Maestro di Matematica" at the Royal Military Academy of the Theory and Practice of Artillery in 1755, where he taught courses in calculus and mechanics to support the Piedmontese army's early adoption of the ballistics theories of Benjamin Robins and Leonhard Euler.

In that capacity, Joseph-Louis Lagrange was the first to teach calculus in an engineering school.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange is one of the founders of the calculus of variations.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange wrote several letters to Leonhard Euler between 1754 and 1756 describing his results.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange applied his ideas to problems of classical mechanics, generalising the results of Euler and Maupertuis.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange published his method in two memoirs of the Turin Society in 1762 and 1773.

In 1758, with the aid of his pupils, Joseph-Louis Lagrange established a society, which was incorporated as the Turin Academy of Sciences, and most of his early writings are to be found in the five volumes of its transactions, usually known as the Miscellanea Taurinensia.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange's solution is especially interesting as containing the germ of the idea of generalised equations of motion, equations which he first formally proved in 1780.

In 1766, after Euler left Berlin for Saint Petersburg, Frederick himself wrote to Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressing the wish of "the greatest king in Europe" to have "the greatest mathematician in Europe" resident at his court.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange spent the next twenty years in Prussia, where he produced a long series of papers published in the Berlin and Turin transactions, and composed his monumental work, the Mecanique analytique.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was a favourite of the king, who frequently lectured him on the advantages of perfect regularity of life.

The lesson was accepted, and Joseph-Louis Lagrange studied his mind and body as though they were machines, and experimented to find the exact amount of work which he could do before exhaustion.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange carefully planned his papers before writing them, usually without a single erasure or correction.

Nonetheless, during his years in Berlin, Joseph-Louis Lagrange's health was rather poor, and that of his wife Vittoria was even worse.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange died in 1783 after years of illness and Lagrange was very depressed.

In 1786, following Frederick's death, Joseph-Louis Lagrange received similar invitations from states including Spain and Naples, and he accepted the offer of Louis XVI to move to Paris.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange insisted on marrying him and proved a devoted wife to whom he became warmly attached.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was involved in the development of the metric system of measurement in the 1790s.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was offered the presidency of the Commission for the reform of weights and measures when he was preparing to escape.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was one of the founding members of the Bureau des Longitudes in 1795.

In 1795, Joseph-Louis Lagrange was appointed to a mathematical chair at the newly established Ecole Normale, which enjoyed only a short existence of four months.

In 1794, Joseph-Louis Lagrange was appointed professor of the Ecole Polytechnique; and his lectures there, described by mathematicians who had the good fortune to be able to attend them, were almost perfect both in form and matter.

In 1810, Joseph-Louis Lagrange started a thorough revision of the Mecanique analytique, but he was able to complete only about two-thirds of it before his death in Paris in 1813, in 128 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was buried that same year in the Pantheon in Paris.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was extremely active scientifically during the twenty years he spent in Berlin.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange remarked that mechanics was really a branch of pure mathematics analogous to a geometry of four dimensions, namely, the time and the three coordinates of the point in space; and it is said that he prided himself that from the beginning to the end of the work there was not a single diagram.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange believed that he could thus get rid of those difficulties, connected with the use of infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, to which philosophers objected in the usual treatment of the differential calculus.

At a later period Joseph-Louis Lagrange fully embraced the use of infinitesimals in preference to founding the differential calculus on the study of algebraic forms; and in the preface to the second edition of the Mecanique Analytique, which was issued in 1811, he justifies the employment of infinitesimals, and concludes by saying that:.

In 1806 the subject was reopened by Poisson, who, in a paper read before the French Academy, showed that Joseph-Louis Lagrange's formulae led to certain limits for the stability of the orbits.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who was present, now discussed the whole subject afresh, and in a letter communicated to the academy in 1808 explained how, by the variation of arbitrary constants, the periodical and secular inequalities of any system of mutually interacting bodies could be determined.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1790, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1806.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was awarded the Grand Croix of the Ordre Imperial de la Reunion in 1813, a week before his death in Paris, and was buried in the Pantheon, a mausoleum dedicated to the most honoured French people.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was awarded the 1764 prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his memoir on the libration of the Moon.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange shared or won the prizes of 1772,1774, and 1778.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange is one of the 72 prominent French scientists who were commemorated on plaques at the first stage of the Eiffel Tower when it first opened.