Michel Chasles

Michel Chasles
Born
15 November 1793
pernon, France
Died
18 December 1880 (aged 87)
Paris
Nationality
French
Fields
Mathematics
Doctoral advisor
Simon Denis Poisson
Doctoral students
J ean Gaston Darboux
Hubert Anson Newton
Notable awards
Copley Medal (1865)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michel Floral Chasles (15 November 1793 18 December
1880) was a French mathematician.
He was born at pernon in France and studied at the cole
Polytechnique in Paris under Simon Denis Poisson. In the
War of the Sixth Coalition he was drafted to fight in the
defence of Paris in 1814. After the war, he gave up on a
career as an engineer or stockbroker in order to pursue his
mathematical studies.
In 1837 he published his Historical view of the origin and
development of methods in geometry, a study of the method
of reciprocal polars in projective geometry. The work gained
him considerable fame and respect and he was appointed
Professor at the cole Polytechnique in 1841, then he was
awarded a chair at the Sorbonne in 1846. A second edition of
his book was published in 1875, and Leonhard Sohncke
translated the work into German.
J akob Steiner had proposed the problem of enumerating the
number of conic sections tangent to each of five given conics,
and had answered it incorrectly. Chasles developed a theory
of characteristics that enabled the correct enumeration of the
conics (there are 3264) (see enumerative geometry). He
established several important theorems (all called Chasles'
theorem). That on solid body kinematics was seminal for
understanding their motions, and hence to the development of
the theories of dynamics of rigid bodies.
In 1865 he was awarded the Copley Medal.
As described in A Treasury of Deception, by Michael
Farquhar (Peguin Books, 2005), between 1861 and 1869
Chasles purchased over 27,000 forged letters from Frenchman Denis Vrain-Lucas. Included in this trove were
letters from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, from Cleopatra to J ulius Caesar, and from Mary Magdalene to a
revived Lazarus, all in a fake maedieval French. In 2004, the journal Critical Inquiry published a recently
"discovered" 1871 letter written by Vrain-Lucas (from prison) to Chasles, conveying Vrain-Lucas's perspective
on these events,
[1]
itself an invention.
[2]
In 1986, Alexander J ones published a commentary on Book 7 of the Collection of Pappus of Alexandria, which
Chasles had referred to in his history of geometric methods. J ones makes these comments about Chasles,
Pappus and Euclid:
[3]
Chasles's contribution to our comprehension of the Porisms tends to be obscured by the inherent
unreasonableness of his claim to have restored substantially the contents of Euclid's book on the basis of
Michel Chasles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Chasles
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the meagre data of Pappus and Proclus...one still turns to Chasles for the first appreciation of the interest
in the Porisms from the point of view of modern geometry. Above all, he was the first to notice the
recurrence of cross-ratios and harmonic ratios in the lemmas, and because these concepts suffuse most of
his restoration, it is probable that many of his inventions coincide with some of Euclid's, even if we
cannot now tell which they are.
Chasles' name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
ChaslesCayleyBrill formula
Asteroid 18510 Chasles
^ Ken Alder, "History's Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud Along the Seine (http://www.kenalder.com/other
/Alder.CritInquiry.Forger1.pdf)," Critical Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004):704-716.
1.
^ Anne H. Stevens, Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction and Literary Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(http://unlv.academia.edu/AnneStevens/Papers/1202832/Forging_Literary_History), Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture: Volume 37, J ohns Hopkins University Press, Mar 18, 2008.
2.
^ Alexander J ones (1986) Book 7 of the Collection, part 1: introduction, text, translation ISBN 0-387-96257-3, part 2:
commentary, index, figures ISBN 3-540-96257-3, Springer-Verlag
3.
M. Chasles (1837) Aperu historique sur l'origine et le dveloppement des mthodes en gomtrie
(https://archive.org/details/aperuhistorique01chasgoog), originally published by Hayez in Bruxelles, now
from archive.org.
M. Chasles (1841) Two geometrical memoirs on the general properties of cones of the second degree, and
other spherical conics (http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=math;cc=math;view=toc;
subview=short;idno=02950001), Charles Graves translator, originally published in Dublin, now from
Cornell University.
M. Chasles (1865) Trait des sectiones-coniques (http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ABN6567.0001.001),
Gauthier-Villars, from University of Michigan.
M. Chasles (1852, 1880) Trait de Gomtrie Suprieure (http://books.google.ca
/books?id=AWIPAAAAYAAJ ), Gauthier-Villars, from Google.
O'Connor, J ohn J .; Robertson, Edmund F., "Michel Chasles" (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk
/Biographies/Chasles.html), MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
Michel Chasles (http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=26995) at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michel_Chasles&oldid=606963976"
Categories: Burials at Pre Lachaise Cemetery 19th-century French mathematicians Geometers
Michel Chasles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Chasles
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Historians of mathematics University of Paris faculty Recipients of the Copley Medal
cole Polytechnique alumni Members of the French Academy of Sciences Lyce Louis-le-Grand alumni
1793 births 1880 deaths Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Corresponding Members of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences
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