French Physicists contemporary with Fourier and Poisson From `A Short Account of the History of Mathematics' (4th edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball. Sadi Carnot Fresnel Biot Arago Sadi Carnot Among Fourier's contemporaries who were interested in the theory of heat the most eminent was Sadi Carnot , a son of the eminent geometrician mentioned above. Sadi Carnot was born at Paris in 1796, and died there of cholera in August 1832; he was an officer in the French army. In 1824 he issued a short work entitled , in which he attempted to determine in what way heat produced its mechanical effect. He made the mistake of assuming that heat was material, but his essay may be taken as initiating the modern theory of thermodynamics. was born at Lyons on January 22, 1775, and died at Marseilles on June 10, 1836. He was widely read in all branches of learning, and lectured and wrote on many of them, but after the year 1809, when he was made professor of analysis at the Polytechnic school in Paris, he confined himself almost entirely to mathematics and science. His papers on the connection between electricity and magnetism were written in 1820. According to his theory, propounded in 1826, a molecule of matter which can be magnetized is traversed by a closed electric current, and magnetization is produced by any cause which makes the direction of these currents in the different molecules of the body approach parallelism. Fresnel Biot Augustin Jean Fresnel , born at Broglie on May 10, 1788, and died at Ville-d'Avray on July 14, 1827, was a civil engineer by profession, but he devoted his leisure to the study of physical optics. The undulatory theory of light, which Hooke, Huygens, and Euler had supported on | |
|
