Joseph-Louis Lagrange

Born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia in Turin in 1736, he was already deep into mathematical analysis as a young man when Euler and d'Alembert noticed his work. In 1766 he succeeded Euler himself as director of mathematics at the Prussian Academy in Berlin, where he spent over twenty years writing volumes that won French Academy prizes. His *Mécanique analytique*, written in Berlin and published in 1788, gave classical mechanics its most comprehensive treatment since Newton and laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century mathematical physics. At 51 he left for Paris, became a member of the French Academy of Sciences, helped drive Revolutionary France's shift to the decimal system, and was named the first professor of analysis when the École Polytechnique opened in 1794. He became a Senator in 1799 and remained in France until his death in 1813.