◀ ▲ ▶History / 18th-century / Person: De Bougainville, Louis Antoine

Person: De Bougainville, Louis Antoine

Louis-Antoine de Bougainville was a French soldier and explorer who wrote a calculus book, but is better known for his other exploits.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• He was a notary, that is a public official who authenticates writings such as deeds and takes affidavits, and depositions.
• After completing his secondary schooling Bougainville was influenced by d'Alembert and he wrote Traité du calcul -intégral in 1752.
• This extended de l'Hôpital's book, written more that half a century earlier, to cover the integral calculus and also updated the differential calculus providing an up-to-date text.
• The Académie des Sciences noticed the work in January 1753.
• This work led to Bougainville's election to the Royal Society of London in 1756.
• Bougainville then gave up mathematics.
• Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and distinguished himself against the British in the French and Indian War.
• In 1766 the French government commissioned Bougainville to sail round the world.
• Bougainville had an open mind on the question of a southern continent.
• In November 1766, accompanied by naturalists and other scientists, Bougainville sailed from Nantes in the frigate La Boudeuse.
• He put into Brest for repairs and set off again on 5 December.
• He called in at Rio de Janeiro and there met up with his supply ship.
• On that ship was the botanist Commerson who had discovered a shrubby climbing deciduous plant whose flowers were insignificant but were surrounded by brilliant coloured purple-red papery bracts that lasted for a long time.
• He named the plant bougainvillea in honour of Bougainville.
• The two ships left Rio de Janeiro in July 1767 on their way to Montevideo.
• They left the River Plate in November 1767 and sailed through the Strait of Magellan in December.
• Bougainville went northwest through the South Pacific and by the end of March 1768 he discovered islands in the archipelago of Tuamoto, now French Polynesia.
• Continuing he landed on Tahiti which he found had been discovered eight months earlier in 1767 by the Englishman Samuel Wallis.
• Bougainville then sailed west reaching what is now named Bougainville reef, just to the east of the Great Barrier reef.
• At this point he turned north, where he came very close to sighting Australia, reaching the Louisiade Archipelago, an island group of Papua New Guinea, 200 km southeast of the island of New Guinea.
• Bougainville named the Archipelago after Louis XV of France.
• Then he sailed along the west coast of Choiseul island, in the western Solomon Islands, southeast of (now named) Bougainville Island across the (now named) Bougainville Strait.
• Bougainville continued on to New Britain but, because his men were by then suffering from scurvy and his ships needed refitting, he stopped at Buru in the Moluccas in September 1768.
• At Batavia (now Jakarta) in Java, Bougainville stopped again before returning to Saint-Malo, in Brittany, in March 1769.
• This voyage made Bougainville the first Frenchman to sail round the World.
• He made systematic astronomical observations on his voyage which provided important navigation charts to later explorers.
• Bougainville received great acclaim after he returned to France.
• On 12 April 1782, after a French defeat off Martinique, he was court-martialled.
• During the French Revolution, he escaped the massacres of Paris in 1792 despite his well known Royalist views.
• He settled on his estate in Normandy and later Napoleon made him a senator, a count, and a member of the Legion of Honour.

Born 11 November 1729, Paris, France. Died 31 August 1811, Paris, France.

View full biography at MacTutor

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive