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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MOL-MOS |
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MONGE, GASPARD (1746-1818) , French mathematician, the inventor of descriptive geometry, was born at Beaune on the loth of May 1746. He was educated first at the college of the Oratorians at Beaune, and then in their college at Lyonswhere, at sixteen, the year after he had been Iearning physics, he was made a teacher of it. Returning to Beaune for a vacation, he made, on a large scale, a plan of the town, inventing the methods of observation and constructing the necessary instruments; the plan was presented to the town, and preserved in their library. An officer of engineers seeing it wrote to recommend Monge to the commandant of the military school at Mezieres, and he was received as a draftsman and pupil in the practical school attached to that institution; the school itself was of too aristocratic a character to allow of his admission to it. His manual
In 1768 Monge became professor of mathematics, and in 1771 professor of physics, at Mezieres; in 1778 he married Mme Horbon, a young widow whom he had previously defended in a very spirited manner from an unfounded charge; in 178o he was appointed to a chair of hydraulics at the Lyceum in Paris (held by him together with his appointments at Mezieres), and was received as a member of the Academic; his intimate friend-ship with C. L. Berthollet began at this time. In 1783, quitting Mezieres, he was, on the death of E. Bezout, appointed examiner of naval candidates. Although pressed by the minister to prepare for them a complete course of mathematics, he declined to do so, on the ground that it would deprive Mme Bezout of her only income, from the sale of the works of her late
Monge contributed (1770-1790) to the Memoirs of the Academy of Turin, the Memoires des savantes strangers of the Academy of Paris, the Memoires of the same Academy, and the Annales de chimie, various mathematical and physical papers. Among these may be noticed the memoir " Sur la theorie des deblais et des remblais " (Hem. de l'acad. de Paris, 1781), which, while giving a remarkably elegant investigation in regard to the problem of earth-work referred to in the title, establishes in connexion with it his capital discovery of the curves of curvature of a surface. Leonhard Euler, in his paper on curvature in the Berlin Memoirs for s76o, had considered, not the normals of the surface, but the normals of the plane sections through a particular normal, so that the question of the intersection of successive normals of the surface had never presented itself to him. Monge's memoir just referred to gives the ordinary differential equation of the curves of curvature, and establishes the general theory in a very satisfactory manner; but the application to the interesting particular case of the ellipsoid was first made by him in a later paper in 1795. A memoir in the volume for 1783 relates to the production of water by the combustion of hydrogen; but Monge's results had been anticipated by Henry Cavendish.In 1792, on the creation by the Legislative Assembly of an executive council, Monge accepted the office of minister of the marine, but retained it only until April 1793. When the Committee of Public Safety made an appeal to the savants to assist in producing the materiel required for the defence of the republic, he applied himself wholly to these operations, and distinguished himself by his indefatigable activity therein; he wrote at this time his Description de fart de fabriquer les canons, and his Avis aux ouvriers en fer sur la fabrication de l'acier. He took a very active part in the measures for the establishment
establishment , under A. Massena, of the short-lived Roman republic; and he thence joined the expedition to Egypt, taking part with his friend Berthollet as well in various operations of the war as in the scientific labours of the Egyptian Institute of Sciences and Arts; they accompanied Bonaparte to Syria, and returned with him in 1798 to France. Monge was appointed president of the Egyptian commission, and he resumed his connexion with the polytechnic school. His later mathematical papers are published (1794-x816) in the Journal and the Correspondance of the polytechnic school. On the formation of the Senate he was appointed a member of that body
Napoleon
list
For further information see B. Brisson, Notice historique sur Gaspard Monge; Dupin, Essai historique sur les services et les travaux scientifiques de Gaspard Monge (Paris, 1819), which contains (pp. 162166) a list
Monge's various mathematical papers are to a considerable extent reproduced in the Application de l'anatyse a la geomeirie (4thed., last revised by the author, Paris, 1819) ; the pure text of this is reproduced in the 5th ed. (revue, corrigee et annotee par M. Liouville) (Paris, 1850), which contains also Gauss's Memoir, " Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curvas," and some valuable notes by the editor. The other principal separate works are Trailee elementaire de la statique, 8' edition, conformee a la precedente, par M. Hachette, et suivie dune note &'c., par M. Cauchy (Paris, 1846) ; and the Geometric descriptive (originating, as mentioned above, in the lessons given at the normal school). The 4th edition, published shortly after the author's death, seems to have been substantially the same as the 7th (Geometric descriptive par G. Monge, suivie d'une theorie des ombres et- de la perspective, extraite des apiers de l'auteur, par M. Brisson (Paris, 1847). (A. CA.) End of Article: MONGE, GASPARD (1746-1818) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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