Person: Bossut, Charles
Charles Bossut was a French mathematician who was famed for his textbooks which were widely used throughout France.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Montucla was five years older than Bossut and completed his studies at the Jesuit College of Lyon about the time that Bossut entered.
- Another famous mathematician also studied under Père Béraud at the College, namely Jérôme Lalande who was two years younger than Bossut so the two overlapped at the College.
- Although his main interests were in mathematics, and particularly in mathematical education, Bossut continued in the Church after his studies at the Jesuit college, and took holy orders becoming an abbé.
- He was then properly addressed as the Abbé Charles Bossut.
- Before this in 1752, at the age of 21, Bossut had been appointed professor of mathematics at the École du Génie at Mézières, the first school of military engineering which had been established at Mézières in 1748.
- (Lazare Carnot, himself a graduate of Mézières who studied there after Bossut had left, moved the school to Metz in 1794 where it was renamed the École Polytechnique).
- While at Mézières, Bossut transformed the quality and content of the courses.
- It was a memoir of 1762 which won Bossut the Grand Prix of the Academy of Sciences for work on the resistance of fluids to the motion of planets.
- However the École du Génie brought Monge into contact with Bossut who encouraged him to develop his ideas on geometry.
- After Bossut left the chair of mathematics at the École du Génie at Mézières in 1768, Monge was appointed to succeed him in January 1769.
- Bossut's reply has not survived; but the judgment evidently was encouraging, for in June of the same year there appeared in the J Encyclopédique a "Lettre de M Monge" containing a summary of his results.
- Bossut is famed for his textbooks which were widely used throughout France.
- Since Condorcet and Bossut were close collaborators it may have essentially been created for Bossut who certainly was appointed and filled it until 1780.
- In 1775 Bossut participated with d'Alembert and Condorcet in experiments on fluid resistance.
- Bossut became somewhat of a recluse during the last years of his life.
Born 11 August 1730, Tartaras (near Rive de Gier), Rhône-et-Loire, France. Died 14 January 1814, Paris, France.
View full biography at MacTutor
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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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
