- Pierre Varignon
Pierre Varignon (
Caen 1654 –December 23 ,1722 Paris ) was a Frenchmathematician . He was educated at the Jesuit College and the University inCaen , where he received his M.A. in 1682. He tookHoly Orders the following year.Varignon gained his first exposure to mathematics by reading
Euclid and then Descartes' "La Géométrie ". He becameprofessor of mathematics at the Collège Mazarin in Paris in 1688 and was elected to theAcadémie Royale des Sciences in the same year. In 1704 he held the departmental chair at Collège Mazarin and also became professor of mathematics at the Collège Royal. He was elected to theBerlin Academy in 1713 and to theRoyal Society in 1718. Many of his works were published in Paris in 1725, three years after his death. His lectures at Mazarin were published in "Eléments de mathématiques" in 1731.Varignon was a friend of Newton, Leibniz, and the
Bernoulli family . Varignon's principal contributions were to graphicstatics andmechanics . Except for l'Hôpital, Varignon was the earliest and strongest French advocate ofdifferential calculus . He recognized the importance of a test for the convergence of series, but analytical difficulties prevented his success. Nevertheless, he simplified the proofs of many propositions in mechanics, adapted Leibniz's calculus to the inertial mechanics of Newton's "Principia ", and treated mechanics in terms of the composition of forces in "Projet d'une nouvelle mécanique" in 1687. Among Varignon's other works was a 1699 publication concerning the application of differential calculus to fluid flow and towater clock s. In 1690 he created a mechanical explanation of gravitation. In 1702 he applied calculus to spring-driven clocks.See also
*
Varignon's theorem External links
* [http://agutie.homestead.com/files/VarigWitten.htm Varignon and Wittenbauer Parallelograms] by Antonio Gutierrez from "Geometry Step by Step from the Land of the Incas"
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