◀ ▲ ▶History / 18th-century / Person: Arbogast, Louis François Antoine
Person: Arbogast, Louis François Antoine
Louis Arbogast was a French mathematician who worked on the calculus of derivatives and the operational calculus.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- From this time on information on Arbogast becomes more plentiful.
- While at the Collège de Colmar Arbogast entered a mathematical competition which was run by the St Petersburg Academy.
- Arbogast submitted an essay to the St Petersburg Academy in which he came down firmly on the side of Euler.
- Arbogast won the prize with his essay and his notion of discontinuous function became important in Cauchy's more rigorous approach to analysis.
- In 1789 Arbogast moved from Colmar to Strasbourg where he taught mathematics at the École d'Artillerie.
- Arbogast's career in Strasbourg reached new heights.
- The formal algebraic manipulation of series investigated by Lagrange and Laplace in the 1770s was put in the form of operator equalities by Arbogast in 1800 in Calcul des dérivations.
- Arbogast was interested in the history of mathematics and classified Mersenne's papers and collected manuscript copies of memoirs and letters of Fermat, Descartes, Johann Bernoulli, Varignon, de L'Hôpital and others.
- Arbogast was friendly with François Français and together they worked on the calculus of derivations and the operational calculus.
- After Arbogast died in 1803, François Français inherited his collection of manuscripts, and also his mathematical papers.
- He continued Arbogast's work on the operational calculus and presented a memoir on this topic, in particular applying the methods to study projectiles in a resistant medium, to the Académie des Sciences in 1804.
- The historical manuscripts which went to François Français on Arbogast's death were bought by Libri from a bookseller in Metz in 1839.
- We should mention one other important contribution made by Arbogast.
- Arbogast was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1792 and the mathematics section of the Institut National in 1796.
Born 4 October 1759, Mutzig, Alsace. Died 18 April 1803, Strasbourg, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
