- Louis François Antoine Arbogast
Louis François Antoine Arbogast (
October 4 ,1759 -April 8 ,orApril 18 ,1803 ) was a Frenchmathematician . He was born atMutzig inAlsace and died atStrasbourg , where he was professor. He wrote on series and the derivatives known by his name: he was the first writer to separate the symbols of operation from those of quantity.He was professor of mathematics at the Collège de
Colmar and entered a mathematical competition which was run by theSt Petersburg Academy. His entry was to bring him fame and an important place in the history of the development of the calculus. Arbogast submitted an essay to the St Petersburg Academy in which he came down firmly on the side ofEuler . In fact he went much further than Euler in the type of arbitrary functions introduced by integrating, claiming that the functions could be discontinuous not only in the limited sense claimed by Euler, but discontinuous in a more general sense that he defined that allowed the function to consist of portions of different curves. Arbogast won the prize with his essay and his notion of discontinuous function became important inCauchy 's more rigorous approach to analysis.In 1789 he submitted in Strasbourg a major report on the differential and integral calculus to the
Académie des Sciences inParis which was never published. In the Preface of a later work he described the ideas that prompted him to write the major report of 1789. Essentially he realised that there was no rigorous methods to deal with the convergence of series, and Arbogast's career reached new heights. In addition to his mathematics post, he was appointed as professor of physics at the Collège Royal in Strasbourg and from April 1791 he served as its rector until October 1791 when he was appointed rector of the University of Strasbourg; in 1794 he was appointed Professor of Calculus at the École centrale (soon to become theÉcole polytechnique ) but he taught at the École préparatoire.His contributions to mathematics show him as a philosophical thinker that has to face his era. As well as introducing discontinuous functions, as we discussed above, he conceived the calculus as operational symbols. The formal algebraic manipulation of series investigated by Lagrange and
Laplace in the 1770s has been put in the form of operator equalities by Arbogast in 1800. We owe him the general concept offactorial as a product of a finite number of terms inarithmetic progression ."The original version of this article was taken from the
public domain resource theRouse History of Mathematics ."External links
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Further reading
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last = Itard
first = Jean
title = Arbogast, Louis François Antoine
encyclopedia =Dictionary of Scientific Biography
volume = 1
pages = 206-208
publisher = Charles Scribner's Sons
location = New York
date = 1970
isbn = 0684101149
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