École des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, France
Lancret entered the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1793 and was sent as a student to the port of Dunkerque.
École Polytechnique, Paris, France
Admitted on November 21, 1794, to the first graduating class of the École Polytechnique, he studied there for three years.
École des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, France
Lancret entered the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1793 and was sent as a student to the port of Dunkerque.
École Polytechnique, Paris, France
Admitted on November 21, 1794, to the first graduating class of the École Polytechnique, he studied there for three years.
Michel Ange Lancret was born on December 15, 1774, in Paris, France. He was the son of an architect François Nicolas Lancret - who was the son of an engraver and nephew of the painter Nicholas Lancret - and Germaine Marguerite Vinache de Mountblain, the daughter of a sculptor.
Lancret entered the École des Ponts et Chaussées in 1793 and was sent as a student to the port of Dunkerque. Admitted on November 21, 1794, to the first graduating class of the École Polytechnique (at that time the École Centrale des Travaux Publics), he studied there for three years and, along with twenty-four of his fellow students, including J. B. Biot and E.-L. Malus, he served as a monitor.
After several months of specialization, Lancret was named engineer of bridges and highways in April 1798, and in this capacity, he was made a member of the Commission of Arts and Sciences attached to the Egyptian expedition. He reached Egypt on July 1, 1798, and was entrusted with important topographical operations, irrigation projects, and canal maintenance, as well as with archaeological studies, the description of the ancient monuments of the Upper Kingdom, and entomological studies.
On July 4, 1799, Lancret was named a member of the mathematics section of the Institut d’Éypte, where he presented several memoirs on his topographical work and communications from others, including one on the discovery of the Rosetta stone (July 19, 1799) and Malus’s first memoir on light. Sent home at the end of 1801, he was soon appointed a secretary of the commission responsible for the Description de l’Égypte, eventually succeeding Nicolas Conté as the official representative of the government in December 1805. The author of several memoirs on topography, architecture, and political economy, and of numerous drawings of monuments, he devoted himself passionately to this editorial assignment while continuing to do research in infinitesimal geometry.
In his first memoir on the theory of space curves, presented in April 1802, Lancret cites and unpublished theorem of Fourier’s on the relationships between the curvature and torsion of a curve and the corresponding elements of the cuspidal edge of its polar curve. In addition, he studied the properties of the rectifying surface of a curve and integrated the differential equations of its evolutes. In a second memoir, he developed the theory of “développoïdes,” cuspidal edges of developable surfaces with pas through a given curve and whose generating lines make a constant angle with this curve.
Michel Ange Lancret went down in history as a prominent engineer, best known for his studies of various monuments on the banks of the Nile and remnants of an ancient civilization of the pharaohs. Although limited in extent, his theory of cuspidal edges of developable surfaces places Lancret among the most direct disciples of Monge in infinitesimal geometry.
In 1798 Lancret was made a member of the Commission of Arts and Sciences.
Presumably, Lancret never married.
