Adrien-Marie Legendre

For other uses, see Legendre.

Adrien-Marie Legendre
Watercolor caricature by Julien-Léopold Boilly (see § Mistaken portrait), the only known portrait of Legendre[2]
Born(1752-09-18)18 September 1752
Paris, France
Died9 January 1833(1833-01-09) (aged 80)
Paris, France
NationalityFrench
Alma materCollège Mazarin
Known forAssociated Legendre polynomials
Legendre transformation
Legendre polynomials
Elliptic functions
Introducing the character ∂[1]
Scientific career
FieldsMathematician
InstitutionsÉcole Militaire
École Normale
École Polytechnique
Coat of Arms of Adrien-Marie Legendre, as he was knighted in 1811

Adrien-Marie Legendre (/ləˈʒɑːndər, -ˈʒɑːnd/;[3] French: [adʁiɛ̃ maʁi ləʒɑ̃dʁ]; 18 September 1752 – 9 January 1833) was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him. He is also known for his contributions to the method of least squares, and was the first to officially publish on it, though Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered it before him.[4][5]

  1. ^ Aldrich, John. "Earliest Uses of Symbols of Calculus". Retrieved 20 April 2017.
  2. ^ Duren, Peter (December 2009). "Changing Faces: The Mistaken Portrait of Legendre" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 56 (11): 1440–1443, 1455.
  3. ^ "Legendre". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  4. ^ Plackett, R.L. (1972). "The discovery of the method of least squares" (PDF). Biometrika. 59 (2): 239–251.
  5. ^ Stigler, Stephen M. (1981). "Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares". The Annals of Statistics. 9 (3): 465–474. doi:10.1214/aos/1176345451. ISSN 0090-5364. JSTOR 2240811.