I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm so indebted to her for.
WC Fields (1880-1946)
Picture: Perseus Book Group
Adrien-Marie LegendreDied 9 Jan 1833 at age 80 (born 18 Sep 1752). French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions. In 1794, he was put in charge of the French government's department that was standardizing French weights and measures. In 1813, he took over as head of the Bureau des Longitudes upon the death of Lagrange, its former chief. It was in a paper on celestial mechanics concerning the motion of planets (1784) that he first introduced the Legendre Polynomials. His provided outstanding work on elliptic functions (1786), and his classic treatise on the theory of numbers (1798) and also worked on the method of least squares.«[DSB gives date of death 9 Jan 1833. EB gives 10 Jan 1833.] |
