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AUGUSTIN LOUIS CAUCHY (1789 - 1857) |
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| Augustin Louis Cauchy was born on August
21, 1789, in Paris, the eldest of six children. By the
time he was eleven, both Laplace and Lagrange had
recognized Cauchy's extraordinary talent for mathematics.
In school, he won prizes for Greek, Latin, and the
humanities. At the age of 21, he was given a commission in
Napoleon's army as a civil engineer. For the next few
years, Cauchy attended to his engineering duties while
carrying out brilliant mathematical research on the side.
In 1815, at the age of 26, Cauchy was made Professor of
Mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique and was recognized
as the leading mathematician in France. Cauchy and his
contemporary Gauss were the last men to know the whole of
mathematics as known at their time, and both made
important contributions to nearly every branch, both pure
and applied, as well as to physics and astronomy. Cauchy introduced a new level of rigor into mathematical analysis. We owe our contemporary notions of limit and continuity to him. He gave the first proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Cauchy was the founder of complex function theory and a pioneer in the theory or permutation groups and determinants. His total output of mathematics fills 24 large quarto volumes and is second only to that of Euler. He wrote over 500 research papers after the age of 50. Cauchy died at the age of 68 on May 23, 1857. Additional information can be found at: http://www.scidiv.bcc.ctc.edu/Math/Cauchy.html
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