Œuvres de Maupertuis: Accord de différentes lois de la nature, qui avoient jusqu'ici paru incompatibles. Recherche des lois du mouvement. Loi du repos. Astronomie nautique, ou Élémens d'astronomie. Discours sur la parallaxe de la lune. Opérations pour déterminer la figure de la terre & les variations de la pesanteur. Autres mesures
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, biologist, and astronomer. He is known for helping to popularize Newtonian mechanics. He also introduced the theory of the survival of the fittest in his Essai de Cosmologie, a theory that Charles Darwin later expounded to wide acceptance.
Background
Pierre Louis Maupertuis was born on July 17, 1698, in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France to a moderately wealthy family of merchant-corsairs. His father, Renė, had been involved in a number of enterprises that were central to the monarchy so that he thrived socially and politically and was a member of the Council of Commerce and he also represented the state of Brittany. He had received his title shortly before the birth of Pierre Louis who was his eldest son. Pierre Louis's mother played a large part in forming his character by being excessively protective. Samuel Formey, in his obituary of Maupertuis for the Berlin Academy, wrote: "Madame Moreau idolized her son rather than loved him. She could not refuse him anything." One effect of this treatment was that Maupertuis' younger brother, Moreau de Saint Ellier, was very jealous of the fact that his older brother was treated so much more favorably than he was, and he came to hate Maupertuis because of this.
Education
After private schooling, in 1714 Maupertuis went to Paris at the age of sixteen to study at the Collège de la Marche under Le Blond, but he found ordinary philosophical disciplines quite distasteful. After two years in Paris, however, Maupertuis' mother insisted that he come home to Saint-Malo. In 1717 he began to study music; but he soon developed a strong interest in mathematics, which he pursued under the tutelage of Nicolas Guisnée and, later, François Nicole.
In order to extend the range of his mathematical and scientific knowledge, Maupertuis went to Basle to study under Johann Bernoulli. He matriculated in Basle on 30 September 1729 and spent the session living in Johann Bernoulli's home. At the University of Basel, he received an outstanding education and training. He learned of Descartes' vortex theory model of the solar system and of Leibniz's views on mechanics from his teacher Johann Bernoulli who was perhaps the strongest supporter of these theories. At the same time, however, Maupertuis learned of Newton's physics from Johann Bernoulli who accepted the results of universal gravitation but looked towards Leibniz's theories to provide an explanation for them which Newton left completely unexplained. How could two bodies affect each other when separated by a vacuum?
The navy seemed like an attractive career to Maupertuis but his mother felt it was too dangerous so he was forbidden from pursuing this choice. His father was able to obtain for him the position of lieutenant in the Musketeers and in 1718 he joined the regiment of La Roche Guyon stationed at Lille. Although this was the sort of position that most young men of the time could only dream about, it did not suit Maupertuis. By 1722 he had given up his career as a cavalry officer and was living in Paris enjoying the intellectual life of the cafés. He became friendly with the dramatist, novelist and journalist Marivaux, the playwright La Motte, and mathematicians Joseph Saurin, Nicole, and Terrasson. His early interest in mathematics now blossomed and, with instruction in the higher reaches of the subject from these men, he soon acquired a deep understanding.
Maupertuis became an adjoint in the Académie des Sciences in 1723 and in the following year he produced his first paper Sur la forme des instruments de musique which studied the effect of the shape of an instrument on the characteristics of the note it produced. Further papers followed: on maxima and minima in 1726, on the cycloid in 1727, and further papers on curves in 1727, 1728 and 1729. During this period, however, Maupertuis was also interested in biology. He acted as secretary to the naturalist Bignon and wrote an important paper on the salamander which shows his talents as an excellent observer of the natural world. In 1728 Maupertuis visited London and during this short visit, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Back in Paris by July of 1730 after his education at the University of Basel, Maupertuis began writing papers on mechanics in which he used the expertise he had already developed on curves. By 1731 he had written his first paper on astronomy and another on differential equations and was rapidly developing a reputation as an all-round mathematician and scientist. In 1732 he published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London which treated rotating bodies, discussing, in particular, the nature of Saturn's rings (which he believed to be the captured tail of a comet) and the shape that a rotating body assumes. It is an interesting paper but it contains some errors and shows that Maupertuis has not fully understood Newton's inverse square law and the resulting gravitational force within a solid body.
In May 1735 the Paris Academy sent an expedition to Peru to make measurements of the Earth. It was headed by La Condamine and had Bouguer and Godin as members. A second expedition was sent to Lapland headed by Maupertuis, also to measure the length of a degree along the meridian. It left Dunkirk on 2 May 1736 with the scientists Clairaut and Camus under Maupertuis. They set up base in Tornio in northern Finland and managed to make their measurements despite the problems of being attacked by insects in summer and suffering unbearably cold weather during the winter. They were shipwrecked in the Baltic on their return journey but managed to keep the records of their observations undamaged. Rather strangely Maupertuis brought back with him two native girls from Finland. Back in Paris, he attended the meeting of the Academy on 20 August 1737, reporting that his results confirmed that the Earth was oblate. He made a full report to the Academy on 13 November.
Maupertuis gained fame from this expedition but he forced home his advantage by publishing some vicious attacks on his opponents, in particular on Jacques Cassini. Even his friends were shocked at the personal venom he displayed. His relations with Clairaut and Johann Bernoulli had broken down a little while before. In 1739 he became friendly with du Châtelet and Voltaire spending some time living at their home at Cirey. He tried to patch up relations with Johann Bernoulli, visiting Basle and became increasingly friendly with Johann II Bernoulli. By the end of 1739, he had been awarded a good salary to work on problems of navigation.
Maupertuis was invited to Germany by King Frederick the Great in 1740 as part of Frederick's aim of bringing top philosophers and scientists to Berlin. Frederick informed Maupertuis that he was going to set up the Berlin Academy and invited him to be its president. After staying a while in Berlin while Frederick occupied himself with military matters, he joined the King with the Prussian army at the Battle of Mollwitz in April 1741. Frederick left the field early, fearing defeat, and Maupertuis was taken prisoner by the Austrians. He was treated kindly, taken to Vienna, but soon released and returned to Berlin. By June he was back in Paris, somewhat shaken by his experiences.
Back in Paris, Maupertuis was appointed an assistant director of the Académie des Sciences and in the following year be became its director. On 27 June 1743, he was admitted to the Académie Française. In the autumn of 1744, he went to Basle, and from there he went to the French camp at the siege of Freiburg im Breisgau. He then went back to Prussia taking with him news of the French victory which he delivered to Frederick. The Berlin Academy was now taking shape and Frederick again pressed Maupertuis to become its first president. He decided to accept the position and returned to Paris in the spring of 1745 to tidy up his affairs before taking up his new role.
Maupertuis had now committed himself to Berlin, and the Paris Academy canceled his membership in September 1745 after a campaign against him led by Jacques Cassini. On 12 May 1746, Maupertuis was officially appointed as president of the Berlin Academy, a post which he was to hold for eight years. His presidency did not get off to a good start, however, for in June his father died and he returned to Paris, remaining there until September. Although he tried very hard to make a success of his role as president of the Berlin Academy, things were rather against him. On the one hand, he did not speak German, and although the official business of the Academy was conducted in French or Latin, Maupertuis was rather cut off from the day to day administration which was conducted in German. His other problem was that Frederick wanted his Academy to be world-class, but he was not prepared to put up the necessary funds to attract the top people. Maupertuis tried to overcome this by making appointments of foreigner scientists as associate members who did not work at the Academy. However, the Academy did contain one person of the very highest calibre, namely Euler.
Frederick tried to support the president of his Academy, but Maupertuis's failing health collapsed under the strain and he left Berlin for Paris in 1753. He remained there for over a year, being pressed by Frederick to return to Berlin who claimed that the Academy was out of control now its director was absent. This Maupertuis did in 1754 but then he was apparently blackmailed by a girl who claimed that he was the father of her child.
In 1756 Jacques Cassini died. Shortly after this Maupertuis's membership of the Académie des Sciences was renewed and he was awarded a pension from the Paris Academy. He returned to Paris in July 1756, but by September he was in his home town of Saint-Malo. Advised to travel to Italy for health reasons, he set out in June 1757. By now the French were at war with the Prussians and his position became even more difficult. He spent seven months in Bordeaux but eventually reached Basle in October 1758 where he was a guest in the home of Johann Bernoulli. By the following summer, he realized that his life was nearly over and his wife set out to travel to Basle to be with him. He died before she reached Basle, and was buried at Dornach.
Maupertuis made an expedition to Lapland to determine the shape of the Earth. His measurement verified the Newtonian view that the Earth is an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles). The success of his expedition gained him favor with Frederick the Great, who called him to Berlin. He became a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1741 and served as its president from 1745 to 1753. He is often credited with having invented the principle of least action; a version is known as Maupertuis's principle – an integral equation that determines the path followed by a physical system.
Maupertuis had a significant, even if a secondary, role in the maturing of modern physics and biology alike, as well as in the transition of philosophical thinking from classical metaphysics to the critical position adopted by Immanuel Kant.
The crater Maupertuis on the Moon is named after him, as is the asteroid 3281 Maupertuis.
Pierre Louis Maupertuis was creationist and he believed that the beauty of physical laws shows that it was the of divine design. Maupertuis was a strong critic of the natural theologians, pointing to phenomena incompatible with a concept of a good and wise Creator. He was also one of the first to consider animals in terms of variable populations, in opposition to the natural history tradition that emphasized description of individual specimens.
Politics
Pierre Louis Maupertuis wasn't involved in politics actively bu he regularly dealt with powerful political figures who had an interest in science like Frederick II of Prussia.
Views
In November 1732 he declared himself a supporter of Newton's theory of gravitation in France with his publication of a major treatise Figures des astres. It announced Maupertuis's position on one of the biggest problems of the day, namely the shape of the Earth.
Maupertuis published on many topics including mathematics, geography, moral philosophy, biology, astronomy, and cosmology. One important publication on natural history was Vénus physique in 1745 in which he discussed the biological theory of the formation of the embryo. This work and other work by Maupertuis on heredity proposed a series of conjectures which some see as an early version of the theory of evolution. Indeed if he had taken his conjectures forward and developed them into a more fully formed theory he might now be recognized as putting forward the foundations of the theory of evolution. As it was, although he put forward the mechanism for one species developing into another, he failed to postulate the driving mechanism, namely natural selection.
Maupertuis's principal excursion into ethics, Essai de philosophie morale (1749), tried somewhat overambitiously to reconcile the Stoic, Epicurean, and Christian schools but succeeded only in reaching an eclectic view characterized by the author's own pessimism concerning the chances of human felicity. It offered, however, an early instance of the application of arithmetic to the problem of happiness by its attempt to express, in the analogy of statics, the equations of a "hedonistic calculus."
The views of Maupertuis in epistemology can be judged from a number of his writings. While, like Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and most of the philosophes, he agreed with John Locke that sensation is the source of all our knowledge, his position was appreciably more sophisticated, probably because of his encounter with the Berkeleian critique. If this critique did not quite win him over to subjectivism, he at least became convinced that experience offers no more than the disjointed fragments of merely phenomenal reality and that the substance presumed to excite in the mind the perceptions that in turn are projected cognitively toward the natural world remains itself beyond objective determination. Maupertuis ascribed even the evidence of mathematics not to any intrinsic veracity of such knowledge but to the fact that it is based on the repetition (réplicabilité ) of certain simple ideas that consist of identical units and are abstracted from the heterogeneous totality of sensory impressions. In the same spirit, his Réflexions philosophiques sur l'origine des langues et la signification des mots (1748) raises the equally crucial question of the linguistic prefigurations of sense experience, from which scientific reasoning is unable completely to escape.
It was in 1746, soon after becoming director of the Berlin Academy, that Maupertuis first enunciated the Principle of Least Action and it was four years later that he published it in Essai de cosmologie. Maupertuis hoped that the principle might unify the laws of the universe and combined it with an attempted proof of the existence of God.
In the Essai de cosmologie (1750), Maupertuis's extension of the principle of least action to the much-debated problems of theodicy offered a compromise solution between the radical antifinalism of contemporary materialists and the naive finalism of those who saw God's wisdom in every manifestation of design in nature, however trivial or self-contradictory. By claiming that an actual mathematical equation showed God's regulation of nature through the parsimony of kinetic means employed in the production of all physical events, Maupertuis succeeded in giving an original and seemingly scientific version of the Cosmological Argument. But his assumption that there is logical necessity as such in the existence of mechanical laws, which was consistent with the example of René Descartes and Leibniz, typified a rationalist attitude that, though prevalent at the time, was already undermined by those who, like David Hume, alleged a merely empirical necessity for physical causation. Although Maupertuis's distrust of metaphysical reasoning led him to present his cosmological argument not as demonstrably certain, but only as the best that the imperfect human intellect was capable of, it remained perhaps less plausible than ingenious, particularly since it was affirmed without sufficient regard either to the epistemological difficulties it incurred or to the possible nontheological interpretations of its underlying minimal concept.
Quotations:
"Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects. "
"We cannot doubt that all things are regulated by a supreme Being, who, while he has imprinted on matter forces which show his power, has destined it to execute effects which mark his wisdom. Let us calculate the motion of bodies, but let us also consult the designs of the Intelligence which makes them move."
"The species we see today are but the smallest part of what blind destiny has produced."
"Could one not say that, in the fortuitous combinations of the productions of nature, as there must be some characterized by a certain relation of fitness which are able to subsist, it is not to be wondered at that this fitness is present in all the species that are currently in existence?"
Membership
Pierre Louis Maupertuis was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Pierre Louis Maupertuis became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1731. In 1741, he became a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Presiden in 1745. He also was a member of the French Academy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
French Academy of Sciences
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France
Royal Society
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United Kingdom
French Academy
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France
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
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Kingdom of Prussia
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
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Sweden
Russian Academy of Sciences
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Russia
Personality
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was not only proud but intransigent and incapable of bearing criticism, traits that ultimately led to great unpleasantness in his life and, quite literally, to his undoing.
Despite his many accomplishments, Maupertuis was considered arrogant by many of his fellow countrymen. Eventually, Maupertuis became a target of German mathematician Samuel Koenig, who accused him of plagiarism, and of the French author Voltaire, whose satirical writings about Maupertuis were so savage that Maupertuis eventually left France. Maupertuis died in virtual exile in Basel, Switzerland, in the home of Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli.
Quotes from others about the person
"But what are we to say when we find Kant's most important and brilliant doctrine, that of the ideality of space and of the merely phenomenal existence of the corporeal world, expressed already thirty years previously by Maupertuis? ... Maupertuis expresses this paradoxical doctrine so decidedly, and yet without the addition of proof, that it must be supposed that he also obtained it from somewhere else." - Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
Interests
music
Philosophers & Thinkers
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, William Harvey, George Berkeley
Connections
While in Berlin Pierre Louis Maupertuis had arranged a marriage to Eleonor Borck and, after his brief visit to Paris, he married her in Berlin on 25 August 1745.
Johann Samuel König was a mathematician whom Maupertuis had known for a long time. Both had been students of Johann Bernoulli, both had taught du Châtelet, both had studied the shape of the Earth, and Maupertuis had proposed Samuel König for election to the Berlin Academy. The strange affair began in 1751 when König visited Berlin and gave a paper to Maupertuis to be considered for publication. Clearly Maupertuis never read it, but simply returned it the following day recommending publication. It was indeed published in March 1751 and only then did Maupertuis read it and discover that on the one hand, it argued that the Principle of Least Action was false, on the other hand, it argued that Leibniz was the first to propose the theory. The evidence which was put forward to support the claim was a letter of 1707 from Leibniz to Jacob Hermann.
It is fair to say that by this time Maupertuis had serious health problems. Also, he never reacted well to criticism, becoming ever more sensitive as his health declined, and we have already described the vicious personal attacks he made on his opponents in the argument about the shape of the Earth many years before. However, perhaps most relevant of all, he felt that the Principle of Least Action was his greatest achievement, the one for which he would go down in history. Maupertuis was strongly defended by Euler but he used his position as director of the Academy to have it declare publicly that König had forged the quotation. This left König no option but to resign from the Academy.
In 1739 Maupertuis became friendly with and Voltaire spending some time living at their home at Cirey. Voltaire had at one time been a close friend of Maupertuis, but the two had fallen out years before the sad affair with Konig. Voltaire then his great literary skill to rubbish Maupertuis's ideas, his voyage to Lapland, and he lampooned Maupertuis's amorous adventures in the North.
Cassini objected to Maupertuis’s astronomical practices and to his use of mathematics; although the Paris meridian measurements seemed to imply an elongated Earth, this was strictly an empirical matter and had nothing to do with Cartesian mechanics. (There was no Cartesian explanation for an elongated Earth.) Although the conflict was complicated by Cassini’s hostility toward universal gravitation, this was not essentially a dispute about cosmology. Nevertheless, because of the unmistakable Newtonian overtones of the flattened Earth, the Lapland expedition brought related cosmological and philosophical issues into the public eye.
