Person: Bertins, Alexis Fontaine des

Alexis Fontaine was a French mathematician who worked on the calculus of variations.

Jacques Fontaine was a royal notary, so he served the king in a legal capacity.
In 1732 Fontaine went to live near Paris, where he had acquired a residence, and he began to study mathematics under Castel.
As a result of these papers Fontaine was elected to the Academy in 1733 as an adjoint mécanicien and he was promoted geometer (a term used to mean mathematician at this time) in 1739.
In 1732 Fontaine gave a solution to the brachistochrone problem, in 1734 he gave a solution of the tautochrone problem which was more general than that given by Huygens, Newton, Euler or Jacob Bernoulli, and in 1737 he gave a solution to an orthogonal trajectories problem.
However Fontaine rather spoilt this fine contribution by, in 1767 and 1768, unjustly criticising Lagrange's method of variation presented in 1762.
Fontaine had retired in 1765 to a country estate in Burgundy the purchase of which had stretched his finances to the point of almost leaving him bankrupt.
One of the reasons that Fontaine has come off badly was his apparent attempts to gain credit for ideas which had first been presented by others.
Although Fontaine did not raise any claim of priority, he attracted the hostility of a powerful rival who subsequently took pains to destroy the reputation of his work, which - without being of the first rank - still merits mention for its original inspiration and for certain fecund ideas that it contains.

Born 13 August 1704, Claveyson, Drôme, France. Died 21 August 1771, Cuiseaux, Saône-et-Loire, France.

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