Background
Joseph Gergonne was born on June 19, 1771, in Nancy, France. His father, a painter and architect, died when Joseph was twelve years old.
educator logician mathematician scientist
Joseph Gergonne was born on June 19, 1771, in Nancy, France. His father, a painter and architect, died when Joseph was twelve years old.
Joseph studied at the religious collège of Nancy.
Joseph became a captain in the National Guard in 1791. In 1792 he joined the volunteers to fight the Prussians. He saw action at Valmy, and later that year went to Paris as secretary to his uncle. After a year he was in the army again, this time as secretary to the general staff of the Moselle army. In 1794, after a month at the Cahâlons artillery school, Gergonne received a commission as lieutenant. Sent to the army in the east Pyrences, he participated in the siege of Figueras in Catalonia. After the Treaty of Basel in 1795, Gergonne was sent with his regiment to Nîmes, where he obtained the chair of transcendental mathematics at the newly organized École Centrale. He then began his mathematical career under the influence of Gaspard Monge, the guiding spirit of the École Polytechnique in Paris.
Not finding a regular outlet for mathematical papers in the existing journals, such as the Mémories of the Academy of Sciences or the Journal de l’École Polytechnique, Gergonne began to publish the Annales de matjhématiques pures et appliquées, the first purely mathematical journal. It appeared regularly every month until 1832 and was known as the Annales de Gergonne. His colleague J.E. Thomas-Lavernède was co-editor of the journal after he had accepted, in 1816, the chair of astronomy at the University of Montpellier. In 1830 he became rector at Montpellier and discontinued publishing his Annales after twenty-one volumes and a section of the twenty-second had appeared. In these volumes alone he had published more than 200 papers and questions, dealing mainly with geometry but also with analysis, statics, astronomy, and optics.
By 1831 the Annales had ceased to be the only wholly mathematical journal. In 1825 there appeared at Brussels A. Quetelet’s Correspondance mathématique et physique, and in 1826 at Berlin A.L. Crelle’s Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. In 1836 J. Liouville continued Gergonne’s work in France through his Journal de mathématiques pures et appliqueés. The latter two journals are still being published.
Although Gergonne had given up his journal, he continued to teach after 1830. He retired in 1844, and during the last years of his life suffered from the infirmities of advanced age.
Gergonne’s Annales played an essential role in the creation of modern projective and algebraic geometry. It offered space for many contributors on these and other subjects. The journal contained papers by J.V. Poncelect, F. Servois, E. Bobillier, J. Steiner, J. Plücker, M. Chasles, C.J. Brianchon, C. Dupin, and G. Lamè. The geometry papers stressed polarity and duality, first mainly in connection with conics, then also with structures of higher order. Here the terms “pole,” “polar,” “reciprocal polars,” “duality,” and “class” (of a curve) were first introduced. After Poncelet, in his monumental Traité des propriétés projectives des figures, had given the first presentation of this new geometry in book form, a priority struggle developed between Gergonne and Poncelet. The result was that Poncelet switched to other journals, including Crelle’s.
(Volumes 14-15)
1820(Volumes 20-22)
1825(Volumes 1-2)
1810(Volumes 3-4)
1811Gergonne believed in analytic methods. He said, the methods of analytic geometry were often clumsy, but this was only due to lack of adresse. He illustrated this point in “Recherche du cercle quien touché trios autres sur un plan,” in which he gave an elegant analytic solution of this Apollonian tangent problem. He also contributed to elaborating the principle of duality in projective geometry, by noticing that every theorem in the plane connecting points and lines corresponds to another theorem in which points and lines are interchanged, provided that the theorem embodied no metrical notions.
Quotations: “It is not possible to feel satisfied at having said the last word about some theory as long as it cannot be explained in a few words to any passerby encountered in the street.”
It is said that during the July Revolution of 1830, when rebellious students began to whistle in his class, Gergonne regained their sympathy by beginning to lecture on the acoustics of the whistle.