Pierre-Simon Laplace Facts
Pierre-Simon Laplace Facts
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| Interesting Pierre-Simon Laplace Facts: |
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| Pierre-Simon was born in Beaumont-en-Auge, Normandy where his father owned and farmed some small estates. |
| Much of the information regarding the early life of Laplace was lost when the home of his great-great-grandson, the Comte de Colbert-Laplace, burned in 1925. |
| He received his basic education at the Benedictine priory school because his father intended that he become a Roman Catholic priest. |
| In 1765 entered the University of Caen to study theology. |
| While there he discovered a passion for mathematics and wrote differences Sur le Calcul integral aux infinitment petites et aux differences finies. |
| He became friends with the Italian mathematician and astronomer, Joseph Louis Lagrange. |
| Lagrange founded the Royal Society of Turin and established a journal, Miscellanea Taurinensia. |
| It was in this journal that Laplace published his first scientific paper in 1776. |
| From 1771 t0 1787 he was a teacher at the Ecole Militaire which allowed him time for scientific research. |
| In 1771 he published works on differential equations and finite differences and researched mathematical concepts of probability and statistics. |
| In 1773 he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences. |
| In 1774 he published Memoire sur la probabilite des causes par les evenements which established his reputation in the field of mathematics. |
| In 1776 he began working on celestial mechanics and the stability of the solar system. |
| Using Newtonian physics and Euler's earlier research, Laplace concluded that any two planets and the sun must be in equilibrium for the solar system to remain stable. |
| Between 1799 and 1825 he published Mecanique celeste,a five volume work on astronomy in which he intended to "offer a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system." |
| In it he introduced spherical harmonics and the concept of gravitational potential in celestial mechanics. |
| Laplace developed the concept of scalar potential which defines how gravitational vectors will behave. |
| Unfortunately Laplace did not often credit the work of other scientists so it is not always possible to determine which ideas are original with him. |
| Between 1784 and 1786 he published three papers identifying and explaining the "great Jupiter-Saturn inequality." |
| He realized that the eccentricities in their orbits was due to the near approach to commensurability of their mean motions. |
| Laplace elaborated on the nebular hypothesis first proposed by Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant. |
| The nebular hypothesis of the formation of the solar system continues is the currently accepted explanation for planetary origins. |
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