Adrien Marie Legendre (redirected from Adrien-Marie Legendre)

Legendre, Adrien Marie 

Born Sept. 18, 1752, in Paris; died there Jan. 10, 1833. French mathematician. Member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1783).

Legendre substantiated and developed the theory of geodetic measurements and was the first to discover (1805–06) the method of least squares and use it in calculations. He introduced what are now called the Legendre polynomials and the Legendre transformation and studied Euler’s integrals of the first and second kind. Legendre proved that elliptic integrals are reducible to canonical forms and found their expansions into series and compiled tables of their values. He gave the first systematic and complete exposition of the contemporary theory of numbers. In the calculus of variations he established an existence test for extremums. Legendre wrote a well-known textbook of geometry, in which he unsuccessfully attempted to prove the parallel postulate.

WORKS

Traité des fonctions elliptiques et des intégrales Culériennes, vols. 1–3. Paris, 1825–28.
Théorie des nombres, 4th ed. vols. 1–2. Paris, 1855.
In Russian translation:
Osnovaniia geometrii and trigonometrii St. Petersburg, 1837.

REFERENCE

Wileitner, H. Istoriia matematiki ot Dekarta do sereediny 19 stoletia, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1966. (Translated from German.)