Biography of Kosha. Biography. Childhood and early years
From the point of view of everyday common sense, science is full of paradoxes, contradictions and inconsistencies. This feature of it was subtly noticed by K. Marx: “Unlike other architects,” he noted, “science not only draws castles in the air, but also erects individual residential floors of a building before laying its foundation.”
And so it was. The great mathematicians of the past - Leibniz, Euler, d'Alembert (and mathematicians were then called geometers) - boldly embarked on a free flight of thought in any area of theory and practice, not really caring about the strict justification and sterile proof of their research.
“Step forward and faith will come to you,” d'Alembert said. And they, these romantics of science, walked so quickly that, in the words of the famous mathematician and historian D. Ya. Stroika, “new results poured in in abundance.” And what is very remarkable is that they rarely made mistakes.
In the 19th century, the free flight of thought was replaced by a time of increased rigor, evidence, clear justification of the methods used, revision of the foundations and strengthening of the foundation of all mathematics. And this, of course, did not exclude the courage of thought, but presupposed it.
And the very first to undertake a strict revision of the two-thousand-year-old postulates of Euclid “with all their primitive shortcomings” was Lobachevsky’s “Copernicus of Geometry,” whose ideas, unfortunately, gained strength only after his death. The same thing happened to the brilliant seers Abel and Galois, who did not live to see the triumph of their ideas, which affected the very foundations of mathematics and opened new paths to the future for it.
But the comedy, or rather the human tragedy, was that both the great writer of France and its outstanding mathematician were not progressive people in their social views, although they objectively correctly reflected in their work the world and thereby contributed to his comprehension.
The productivity of the Cauchy mathematician is evidenced by a number of terms, definitions and concepts included in science, such as the Cauchy test, Cauchy criterion, Cauchy problems, Cauchy integral, Cauchy–Riemann and Cauchy–Kovalevskaya equations, related to different sections mathematical analysis, mathematical physics, number theory, and other disciplines. In total, he wrote 700 works (according to other sources 800), moving from one area with incredible ease scientific knowledge to another.
There was a time when Cauchy literally presented a new memoir to the Paris Academy of Sciences every week, and the same difficulties arose with the publication of his works as with the publication of Euler’s works. As his biographers note, the major works “Course of Analysis”, “Summary of Lectures on Infinitesimal Calculus” and “Lectures on Applications of Analysis to Geometry” served as a model for most courses of later times.
Augustin Cauchy's path to science and to the professorial chair was, one might say, exemplary. In 1807 he graduated from the Polytechnic School. He studies engineering at the School of Bridges and Roads. After graduating in 1810, he began his career as an engineer at the construction of a military port in Cherbourg. This was the heyday of Napoleon's empire. The fall of the “great conqueror” and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy led the young Cauchy first to the Polytechnic School, and then to the Sorbonne and the Collège de France as a professor.
Nothing reveals the character of people better than grandiose social upheavals like the Great French Revolution, which the whole world now celebrates, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Restoration, the Hundred Days and the second Bourbon Restoration. Without the revolution, we would not have known that the famous mathematician and creator of Celestial Mechanics Laplace was a politically unprincipled person. He dedicated the first volume of his immortal work to “Napoleon the Great,” and the last to the monarch who succeeded Napoleon. And he was right: Napoleon made him a count, and the king made him a peer and a marquis...
The fate of another mathematician during the French Revolution, the geometer and Jacobin Gaspard Monge, was different. The naval minister of the first French republic, the organizer of its defense, with the return of the Bourbons to the throne, he lost everything: he was deprived of all titles and awards, expelled from the Academy of Sciences and forced to hide from the authorities.
Witnesses of this white terror of the restoration naturally asked the question: who will take Monge’s place at the academy? Is there a mathematician in France so devoid of a sense of decency to take the place of the purest and kindest citizen, the greatest scientist, the creator of the Polytechnic School, which trained dozens of world-famous scientists?..
Such a person was found. It was a graduate of this school, a student of Monge, Augustin Louis Cauchy, who showed himself to be an ardent monarchist. And there is nothing to be surprised about: Cauchy was not elected to the Paris Academy, but appointed by the authorities.
That is why, complaining about such harsh repressive measures applied to the republican Monge, in those days they said with indignation: “His place was shamelessly taken by Cauchy, a great scientist, not endowed, however, with a conscience. He was criminally inattentive to young scientists and lost their work. He is an accomplice, one of the reasons for the death of Galois and Abel.”
Such an unattractive civil and political portrait emerged of the mathematician, who was born in the year of the French Revolution, just five weeks after the storming of the Bastille. His childhood and youth fell on the brightest era in world history of the breakdown of feudalism and the emergence of democracy. It would seem that the young scientist should have absorbed Monge’s republican democratic ideas, as was the case with “two thousand of his sons” from the Polytechnic School, strong in its revolutionary traditions, laid down by him.
But Monge’s kind heart was not passed on to either the great ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte or the future great mathematician Cauchy. And who would have thought that a young man raised by the revolution would ultimately become an ardent reactionary, a cleric, even an ultra-reactionary! But such is life, such are the lessons of history: the titanic efforts of educators sometimes lead to the opposite goals, as the results of annoying propaganda have shown more than once.
In order not to fall into the same importunity and bias, which often interferes with the formation of an objective view of things and people, one has to ask the question: is Cauchy’s image not distorted by his ill-wishers or political opponents, who have created such a persistent legend? Therefore, let's listen to the other side.
The famous Dutch scientist G. Freudenthal, for example, is very critical of stories with “unrecognized geniuses”. “The heartbreaking stories,” he writes, “that are told about Abel are simply fiction... Abel died not of hunger, but of tuberculosis... The fact that Cauchy lost one of his works is a slanderous invention. In any case, it is true that Abel died too early and did not have time to achieve greater fame. The same applies to Galois..."
We do not know whether academician Cauchy lost Abel’s manuscripts, but there is information that he quickly found them and gave them a laudatory review when Niels Henrik Abel had already died. As for the true son of the revolution, the brilliant mathematician and republican Galois, it is well known that Cauchy did not give an answer to his work. And it is not surprising that in his last, dying letter to a friend before the tragic duel, Evariste Galois asked: “You will publicly ask Jacobi or Gauss to give an opinion not on justice, but on the meaning of these theorems. After this, I hope there will be people who will find it necessary to decipher all this nonsense.” As we see, he did not include Cauchy among the few authorities in mathematics whom he could trust.
You can't change history. You can't change personality. During the Second French Revolution, Cauchy resigned his chair at the École Polytechnique and left the country. Biographical dictionaries and reference books report without emotion that he was supposedly “traveling” around Europe at that time. But he simply fled from the revolution, which he feared and hated. After living for several years in Turin and Prague, he returned to Paris in 1838, but refused to take up official academic posts due to his dislike of the regime. After the revolution of 1848 and the establishment bourgeois revolution he was allowed to remain in the country. He stayed and even took the chair, but on one condition: that he be allowed to teach “without conditions,” that is, without an oath to the government. Enviable consistency!
So that Cauchy’s characterization and his relationship with other scientists, and not only young ones, do not seem biased, we will cite another interesting episode. We are talking about Monge's student and follower, the outstanding geometer and mechanic Jean Victor Poncelet. As an officer in Napoleon's engineering forces, he, along with 26 thousand French, was captured by the Russians. And there, in captivity, far from European scientific centers Saratov, wrote seven notebooks, which, upon returning to Paris, turned into the now famous “Treatise on the Projective Properties of Figures,” where the principles new science- projective geometry and the principle of duality was formulated for the first time.
But, as historians Ernest Lavisse and Alfred Rambaud note, his work, sent to the Academy of Sciences in 1824, did not meet with the reception he expected. In his reports, Cauchy placed the “new geometry,” as Poncelet called it, below analysis. Poncelet, who retained an unpleasant memory of this “relatively small” failure for a long time, devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of practical mechanics. I must say that in this new area he succeeded remarkably.
Poncelet’s insight and Cauchy’s strange “blindness” are well explained by the words of the Dutch mathematician D. Ya. Stroik: “Sometimes great new ideas are born outside, and not inside, schools.”
Another noteworthy fact characterizes Cauchy somewhat differently. That’s why we can’t keep silent about it. In 1822, Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky was sent to a Parisian debtor's prison at the request of the hotel owner, to whom he was heavily in debt. While in prison, Ostrogradsky wrote a memoir on the theory of waves in a cylindrical vessel and sent it to Cauchy for consideration. He did not reject the work or lose it, but approved it and achieved publication in the Proceedings of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Moreover, he bought Mikhail Vasilyevich out of prison, although he was no longer very rich, and recommended him for the position of teacher at the lyceum. But it would seem strange: a convinced cleric helped out former student Kharkov University, deprived of his diploma for freethinking and failure to attend lectures on theology. Whether this was a manifestation of Cauchy's ignorance of the political views of the Russian mathematician is difficult to say. Only one thing is known for certain: in 1831, Augustin Louis Cauchy became an honorary foreign member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, while another French mathematician and educational philosopher, the Marquis Condorcet, who actively participated in the Great French Revolution (at its first stage), at the behest of Catherine II from the academy excluded.
There are no words, the honorary titles of the great mathematician Cauchy are well deserved in the scientific field. But let us conclude with one more statement concerning people of science. “If a person works only for himself,” wrote K. Marx, “he can, perhaps, become a famous scientist, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never become a truly perfect and great man.”
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Galina Sinkevich
The language “ε–δ” arose in the works of mathematicians of the 19th century. Although the notation was first introduced by Cauchy, epsilontics as a method was formed in the lectures of Weierstrass. Bolzano in 1817 and Cauchy in 1821 gave definitions of the limit in qualitative form and definitions of a continuous function in the language of increments; Cauchy in 1823 used ε and δ in improving Ampère's proof of the mean value theorem, but Cauchy used ε and δ as finite error estimates, where δ is independent of ε. The process of understanding the concepts of continuity and uniform continuity of a function followed a complex path in the works of Stokes, Seidel, Riemann, Dirichlet, Raabe and many others. The epsilon-delta method was fully demonstrated in determining the limit only by Weierstrass in 1861. The legend that the method belonged to Augustin Cauchy arose at the beginning of the 20th century in the work of Lebesgue and was then repeated many times. Turning to primary sources made it possible to correct this historical error.
Interview about the path to science, the scientific environment and the popularization of science with Mikhail Burtsev, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Head of the Laboratory of Neurointelligence and Neuromorphic Systems at the Kurchatov Institute.
This is a participant observation film, a story about real research carried out at the Discretization in Geometry and Dynamics research center. Technical University in Berlin. Mathematicians of Russian origin who work all over the world constantly come to the center. The process of conducting scientific discussions, captured on camera, is a unique material in terms of its impact: the viewer witnesses the thoughts of scientists, the emergence of brilliant ideas, is immersed in the work of the team and shares the full range of emotions of the participants.
His interests were unusually diverse. He wrote more than seven hundred mathematical works, second only to Euler in number. The modern edition of Cauchy was published in twenty-six volumes and covers all branches of mathematics.
Morris Kline
Augustin Louis Cauchy (August 21, 1789 - May 23, 1857) was a great French mathematician whose name is included in the list of the greatest scientists of France, placed on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower.
Cauchy was born in Paris into the family of a lawyer. His birthday almost coincided with the beginning of the Great French Bourgeois Revolution. The boy's first teacher was his father, who taught his sons history and ancient languages, forcing them to read ancient authors in the original.
In 1802 Cauchy entered the Ecole Centrale in Paris, where he studied mainly ancient languages. Passed in 1805 entrance examination to the Central School of Social Sciences of the Pantheon (later renamed the Polytechnic School). The professors were the best scientists of that time; Many school graduates began their careers early and became famous scientists. After graduating from school, Cauchy entered the Institute of Railways. After his graduation in 1810, by appointment of the government, he worked as an engineer for the construction of seaports. Apparently, then he devoted a lot of time to the queen of sciences - mathematics, since already in 1811 he presented to the Academy of Sciences in Paris a work on the theory of polyhedra, which drew the attention of Parisian scientists to him.
In 1813, Cauchy began publishing works on mathematics and quite quickly gained fame and authority among mathematicians. In 1816 he was appointed a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences instead of G. Monge, who was dismissed for political reasons. In the same year, Cauchy's work on the theory of waves on the surface of a heavy liquid received first prize in a mathematics competition, and its author was invited as a teacher in three educational institutions- Ecole Polytechnique, Sorbonne and Collège de France.
On April 4, 1818, Augustin Louis married Aloyse de Bure, a close relative of the main publisher of his works. In 1819 their first daughter, Maria Françoise Alicia, was born, and in 1823 their second and last daughter, Maria Mathilde.
Soon he wrote “A Course of Analysis” (1821), “Summary of Lectures Delivered at the Royal Polytechnic School” (1823), “Lectures on the Application of Analysis to Geometry” (1826-1828). In these courses, Cauchy defined the continuity of a function, built a rigorous theory of convergent series, and introduced the definite integral as the limit of integral sums. The entire analysis system is built on the basis of the limit. Cauchy's books have long served as models for courses in analysis.
The reactionary political climate that reigned in the country until 1830 suited Cauchy perfectly. Louis XVIII died in 1824, but his heir and brother Charles X was even more reactionary. These years were very productive for Cauchy; he published one serious mathematical work after another. He receives appointments to work at the College de France and to the Faculty of Sciences at the University.
However, in July 1830, a new revolution broke out in France. Charles X flees the country, King Louis Philippe I ascends the throne, and Cauchy receives threats from revolutionary-minded students at the École Polytechnique. These events left a serious imprint on his entire later life and significantly undermined his mathematical ability. Cauchy leaves his family and leaves Paris to go abroad. After a short stay in Switzerland, he makes the final decision to refuse to serve the new king of France and is deprived of all posts in his homeland, with the exception of membership in the Academy of Sciences, for which an oath was not required. In 1831, Cauchy left for the Italian city of Turin, where, at the request of the King of Sardinia, he taught at the university from 1832 to 1833. theoretical physics. In 1831 he also became a foreign member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1833, Cauchy moved to Prague, where he taught the grandson of the escaped French king Charles X, for which he was later promoted to barony. In 1834, the wife and daughters of Augustin Louis arrived in Prague. The family was reunited again after four years separation.
Charles X. died in 1836. In 1838, Cauchy returned to Paris, but did not want to take any government positions due to his hostility to the new regime. He limited himself to teaching at a Jesuit college. Since then, the scientist lived in Paris, studying mathematics.
Cauchy wrote about 800 works. This was facilitated not only by Cauchy’s hard work and the genius of his mind, but also by the attention to his work from his contemporaries. In Cauchy's rich scientific heritage, there are works of various types from different departments of mathematics. In them, he presented the results of his own research, reports on work sent to the Academy, and the results of his didactic activities - excellent textbooks on mathematical analysis, which became a model of scientific thinking for subsequent generations of mathematicians.
Cauchy was the first to give a clear definition of the basic concepts of mathematical analysis - limit, continuity of a function, convergence of a series, etc. He established precise conditions for the convergence of a Taylor series to a given function and distinguished between the convergence of this series in general and its convergence to a given function. He introduced the concept of the radius of convergence of a power series, gave the definition of an integral as the limit of sums, and proved the existence of integrals of continuous functions. I found an expression for an analytic function in the form of a contour integral (Cauchy integral) and derived from this representation the expansion of the function into a power series. Thus, he developed the theory of functions of a complex variable: using a contour integral, he found the expansion of a function in a power series, determined the radius of convergence of this series, developed the theory of residues, as well as its applications to various questions of analysis, etc. In the theory of differential equations, Cauchy first posed the general problem of finding a solution to a differential equation with given initial conditions (since then called the Cauchy problem), and gave a method for integrating first-order partial differential equations. Cauchy also studied geometry (the theory of polyhedra, surfaces of the 2nd order), algebra (symmetric polynomials, properties of determinants), number theory (Fermat's theorem on polygonal numbers, the law of reciprocity). He carried out research on trigonometry, mechanics, elasticity theory, optics, and astronomy. Cauchy was a member of the Royal Society of London, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and a number of other European academies.
Of course, Cauchy was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. Alas, the assessments of the scientist as a person, even during his lifetime, were not unanimous. Many attribute to him an unseemly role in tragic destinies his great colleagues of his contemporaries. We do not know whether academician Cauchy lost Abel’s manuscripts, but there is information that he quickly found them and gave them a laudatory review when Niels Henrik Abel had already died. As for the true son of the revolution, the brilliant mathematician and republican Galois, it is well known that Cauchy did not give an answer to his work. And it is not surprising that in his last, dying letter to a friend before the tragic duel, Evariste Galois asked:
You will publicly ask Jacobi or Gauss to give an opinion not on the validity, but on the meaning of these theorems. After this, I hope there will be people who will find it necessary to decipher all this nonsense.
As we see, he did not include Cauchy among the few authorities in mathematics whom he could trust. In those days, complaining about the harsh repressive measures applied to the Republican Monge, they said with indignation:
His place was shamelessly taken by Cauchy, a great scientist who, however, was not endowed with a conscience. He was criminally inattentive to young scientists and lost their work. He is an accomplice, one of the reasons for the death of Galois and Abel.
Other opinions were also expressed. The famous Dutch scientist G. Freudenthal, for example, is very critical of stories with “unrecognized geniuses”.
The heartbreaking stories, he writes, that are told about Abel are simply fiction... Abel died not of hunger, but of tuberculosis... The fact that Cauchy lost one of his works is a slanderous invention. In any case, it is true that Abel died too early and did not have time to achieve greater fame. The same applies to Galois...
But another noteworthy fact is that it characterizes Cauchy somewhat differently. That’s why we can’t keep silent about it. In 1822, Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky was sent to a Parisian debtor's prison at the request of the hotel owner, to whom he was heavily in debt. While in prison, Ostrogradsky wrote a paper on the theory of waves in a cylindrical vessel and sent it to Cauchy for consideration. He did not reject the work or lose it, but approved it and achieved publication in the Proceedings of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Moreover, he bought Mikhail Vasilyevich out of prison, although he was no longer very rich, and recommended him for the position of teacher at the lyceum. And it would seem strange: a convinced cleric helped out a former student at Kharkov University, who had been deprived of his diploma for freethinking and not attending lectures on theology. Whether this was a manifestation of Cauchy's ignorance of the political views of the Russian mathematician is difficult to say.
At 4 o'clock in the morning, on the night of May 23, 1857, at the age of 67, Augustin Louis Cauchy died.
The following mathematical objects are named after Cauchy:
- Cauchy problem
- Cauchy integral
- Cauchy integral formula
- Cauchy's integral theorem
- Cauchy criterion for uniform convergence of series
- Cauchy criterion for the convergence of a number sequence
- Cauchy-Bunyakovsky inequality
- Cauchy's inequality (between arithmetic mean and geometric mean)
- Cauchy sequence
- Cauchy's sign
- Cauchy's theorem on polyhedra
- Cauchy condition
- Cauchy's formula
- Cauchy-Hadamard formula
- Cauchy-Schwarz inequality
- Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem
- Bolzano-Cauchy theorem
- Cauchy distribution
- Cauchy-Riemann equation.
Based on materials from the sites: mudra.org.ua, ega-math.narod.ru, - Wikipedia and the book “Rank of Great Mathematicians” Warsaw, ed. Our Ksengarnya, 197 0.
Man and Scientist Completed by: Anastasia Bondarchuk, group 2G21 Teacher: Tatyana Vasilievna Tarbokova, Associate Professor of the Department of Higher Mathematics PARIS Biography Born on August 21, 1789 in the family of an official, a deeply religious monarchist in Paris. At first, his father, an excellent linguist, studied with Cauchy, after which Augustin entered the Polytechnic School (1805), and then moved to the Paris School of Bridges and Roads (1807), which he graduated in 1810. After graduating from school, he became a communications engineer in Cherbourg. Here he received a responsible assignment to build a military port. It was also here that he began independent mathematical research. In 1811-1812, Cauchy presented several works to the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1813 he returned to Paris and continued his mathematical research. POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL SCHOOL OF BRIDGES AND ROADS CHERBOURG PARIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Biography Since 1816, Cauchy was appointed a member of the Academy by special royal decree. Cauchy's memoirs on the theory of waves on the surface of a heavy liquid receive first prize in a mathematical competition, and Cauchy was invited to teach at the Ecole Polytechnique. 1818: married Aloyse de Bur. They had two daughters. 1821: Algebraic Analysis, a work on the foundations of analysis, was published. Biography 1830: after the July Revolution, Cauchy was forced to go into exile with the Bourbons because he refused to swear allegiance to the new government and did not want to stay in France, from where the king was expelled. He lived mainly in Turin and Prague, being for some time the tutor of the Duke of Bordeaux, the grandson of Charles X, with whom Cauchy traveled around Europe for several years. for which he was promoted to barony by the exiled king. In Turin, the Sardinian king created a special see for him. TURIN PRAGUE DUKE OF BORDEAUX Biography 1836: Charles X died, and the oath to him became invalid. In 1838, Cauchy returned to Paris, but, due to his hostility to the new regime, did not want to take any government positions. He limited himself to teaching at a Jesuit college. Only after the new revolution (1848) did he receive a seat at the Sorbonne, although he did not take the oath; Napoleon III left him in this position in 1852. The revolution of 1848 abolished the oath, and Cauchy received a chair at the College de France, where he worked until his death. Died in Saux (Hauts-de-Seine), France; May 22, 1857. CHARLES X SORBON COLLEGE DE FRANCE Scientific activity He was repeatedly offered various academic positions, but he refused them, not wanting to take the oath, until finally they offered him a chair “without conditions.” Cauchy was a member of the Royal Society of London and the most famous academies. His strong religious and political convictions were the reason that people of opposing parties treated him with partiality and reproached him, among other things, for insufficient completion of his work. Meanwhile, it was precisely the speed with which Cauchy moved from one subject to another that gave him the opportunity to pave many new paths in science. Achievements in mathematics Cauchy wrote over 800 works, the complete collection of his works contains 27 volumes. His works relate to various areas of mathematics (mainly mathematical analysis) and mathematical physics. Cauchy was the first to give a strict definition of the basic concepts of mathematical analysis - limit, continuity, derivative, differential, integral, convergence of series, etc., and laid the foundations of the mathematical theory of elasticity. In his work on optics, Cauchy gave a mathematical development wave theory light and dispersion theory. He also carried out research on geometry (on polyhedra), number theory, algebra, astronomy and many other areas of science. Conclusion His name is included in the list of the greatest scientists of France, placed on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower.
Augustin Louis Cauchy's contributions to mathematics made a huge one.
Augustin Louis Cauchy's contribution to science
Cauchy's great merit is that he developed the foundations of the theory of analytic functions of a complex variable, laid down back in the 18th century. L. Euler and J. D'Alembert.
Especially important have the following results obtained by Cauchy:
- geometric representation of a complex variable as a point moving in a plane along one or another path of integration (this idea was expressed even earlier by K. Gauss and others);
- expression of an analytic function in the form of an integral (Cauchy integral), and hence expansion of the function into a power series;
- development of the theory of residues and its applications to various questions of analysis, etc.
In the field of the theory of differential equations, Cauchy belongs to: formulation of one of the most important general problems in the theory of differential equations (Cauchy problem), the main theorems for the existence of a solution for the case of real and complex variables (for the latter he developed the majorant method) and the method of integrating 1st order partial differential equations (Cauchy method - the method of characteristic stripes).
Augustin Louis Cauchy's contributions to geometry
In geometry, K. generalized the theory of polyhedra, gave new way studies of 2nd order surfaces, investigated the tangency, rectification and quadrature of curves, established the rules for applying analysis to geometry, as well as the equations of the plane and the parametric representation of a straight line in space.
Cauchy proved (1813) that two convex polyhedra with respectively congruent and identically spaced faces have equal dihedral angles between the corresponding faces. In algebra, he proved differently the main theorem of the theory of symmetric polynomials, developed the theory of determinants, finding all their main properties, in particular the multiplication theorem (moreover, K. proceeded from the concept of an alternating function). He extended this theorem to matrices.
Cauchy coined the terms "modulus" of a complex number, "conjugate" complex numbers and others. Cauchy extended Sturm's theorem to complex roots.
In number theory, Cauchy belongs to: a proof of Fermat’s theorem on polygonal numbers, one of the proofs of the law of reciprocity, as well as studies on the theory of algebraic integers, in which he obtained a number of results, later in more general form established by the German mathematician E. Kummer.
Introduction
This work is devoted to the study of the biography of Augustin Louis Cauchy, the great French mathematician and mechanic. The work presents short biography, contribution to science and achievements in the field of mathematics and physics O.L. Cauchy. O.L. Cauchy went down in history thanks to his discoveries in the fields of differential equations, algebra, geometry and mathematical analysis.
Biography of O.L. Cauchy
Mechanic and engineer Augustin Louis Cauchy (08/21/1789 - 05/23/1857) was born in Paris in the family of a lawyer. He was raised by his father in a strictly religious spirit and, probably for this reason, was a very pious person and monarchist all his life. During the Great French Revolution The Cauchy family moved to their small estate in Arcueil, next to which were the estates of the French mathematician, physicist and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (03/23/1749 - 03/05/1827) and the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet (12/09/1748 - 11/06/1822) . These scientists, as well as J. Lagrange, who often visited P. Laplace, had a great influence on O. Cauchy. They noticed Cauchy's mathematical talent. In particular, J. Lagrange said: “This boy, as a geometer, will replace all of us.” However, he advised the father to first give his son a thorough humanitarian education. For this, O. Cauchy was assigned to the prestigious Central School of the Pantheon. Here he showed great ability in the study of modern and ancient languages and French literature. After graduation high school in 1805 O. Cauchy entered the Polytechnic School second on the list, from which he graduated two years later. While studying at the Polytechnic School, he studied mathematics with great success.
After graduating from the Polytechnic School, Cauchy was the first on the list to enter the School of Bridges and Roads in 1807, from which he graduated in 1810, also taking first place in the final exams. After graduating from the Cauchy school, with the rank of a candidate for the position of engineer, he worked on the construction of the Ur Canal, and then on the construction of the bridge in Saint-Cloud. In 1810 he left for Cherbourg, where at the age of 21 he began independent engineering work in the port of Cherbourg. O. Cauchy stayed in Cherbourg for three years.
He devoted his free time from work in Cherbourg to mathematical research and already in 1811-1812. presented several memoirs to the Paris Academy of Sciences, and in 1813. moved to Paris and became fully engaged in scientific and teaching work at the Ecole Polytechnique, the Sorbonne and the Collège de France.
Intensive scientific work served as the basis for O. Cauchy to run for the Paris Academy of Sciences: the first time in 1813 and the second in 1814, but both times he failed. Only in 1816, when the following were removed from the Academy for political reasons: a mathematician, a mechanic, a military engineer and statesman Lazare Nicoll Marguerite Carnot (Carnot L.N. M., 05/13/1753 - 08/02/1829) and G. Monge, O. Cauchy was appointed by royal decree to replace G. Monge.
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