1. Louis Poinsot attended the school of Lycee Louis-le-Grand for secondary preparatory education for entrance to the famous Ecole Polytechnique.
13 Facts About Louis Poinsot
1. 2.
Louis Poinsot thus left the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees and civil engineering to become a mathematics teacher at the secondary school Lycee Bonaparte in Paris, from 1804 to 1809.
3.
Louis Poinsot shared the post with another famous mathematician, Delambre.
4.
On 1 November 1809, Louis Poinsot became assistant professor of analysis and mechanics at his old school the Ecole Polytechnique.
5.
Louis Poinsot worked at the famous Bureau des Longitudes from 1839 until his death.
6.
Louis Poinsot was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1858.
7.
Louis Poinsot is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
8.
Louis Poinsot was the inventor of geometrical mechanics, which showed how a system of forces acting on a rigid body could be resolved into a single force and a couple.
9.
Previous work done on the motion of a rigid body had been purely analytical with no visualization of the motion, and the great value of the work, as Louis Poinsot says, it enables us to represent to ourselves the motion of a rigid body as clearly that as a moving point.
10.
Louis Poinsot proved that the endpoint of the vector moves in a plane perpendicular to the angular momentum of the rigid body.
11.
Two of these had already appeared in Kepler's work of 1619, although Louis Poinsot was unaware of this.
12.
Louis Poinsot contributed to the importance of geometry by creating a chair of advanced geometry at the Sorbonne in 1846.
13.
Louis Poinsot created the chair for Chasles which he occupied until his death in 1880.