Germinal_Dandelin

Germinal Pierre Dandelin

Germinal Pierre Dandelin

French mathematician, soldier and professor of engineering


Germinal Pierre Dandelin (/ʒɛʁminˈal pjˈɛʁ dɑ̃dlˈɛ̃/, 12 April 1794 15 February 1847) was a French mathematician, soldier, and professor of engineering.

Germinal Pierre Dandelin

Life

He was born near Paris to a French father and Belgian mother, studying first at Ghent then returning to Paris to study at the École Polytechnique. He was wounded fighting under Napoleon. He worked for the Ministry of the Interior under Lazare Carnot. Later he became a citizen of the Netherlands, a professor of mining engineering in Belgium, and then a member of the Belgian army.

Work

He is the eponym of the Dandelin spheres, of Dandelin's theorem in geometry (for an account of that theorem, see Dandelin spheres), and of the DandelinGräffe numerical method of solution of algebraic equations. He also published on the stereographic projection, algebra, and probability theory.

References

  • Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 19701990).
  • Florian Cajori, The DandelinGräffe method, in A history of Mathematics (New York, 1938), 364.
  • A. S. Householder, Dandelin, Lobachevskii, or Gräffe?, American Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 464466.
  • A. Quetelet, G P Dandelin, Biographie nationale XIV (Brussels,1873), 663668.
  • C. Runge, The DandelinGräffe method, in Praxis der Gleichungen (Berlin-Leipzig, 1921), 136158.

Further reading

  • Struik, Dirk J. (1970–1980). "Dandelin, Germinal Pierre". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 554–555. ISBN 978-0-684-10114-9.

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Germinal_Dandelin, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.