Person: Reynaud, Antoine-André-Louis

Antoine-André-Louis Reynaud was a French mathematician who published a number of extremely influential textbooks.

Reynaud was attracted to literature when he was young and he wrote a number of plays.
In 1796 Reynaud gave up his accountant job and entered the École Polytechnique in Paris.
In 1800 a school was founded to prepare pupils for entry to the École Polytechnique and Reynaud began teaching mathematics at the school, although he received no salary for this post.
Reynaud was to hold a variety of different posts.
Although strongly republican in views in his youth, Reynaud became more liberal in his views and from 1814 he supported Louis XVIII.
Reynaud published a number of extremely influential textbooks.
His best known texts, however, were his editions of Bézout's Traité d'arithmétique Ⓣ(Treatise on arithmetic) which appeared in at least 26 versions containing much original work by Reynaud.
It appears that Reynaud became interested in algorithms when he was working with de Prony.
At this time de Prony was very much involved in trying to get his logarithmic and trigonometric tables published and it seems to have made Reynaud think about analysing algorithms.
Certainly Reynaud, although his results in this area were rather trivial, must get the credit for being one of the first people to give an explicit analysis of an algorithm, an area of mathematics which is of major importance today.

Born 12 September 1771, Paris, France. Died 24 February 1844, Paris, France.

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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

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