Jean baptiste joseph fourier biography

From `A Short Account of the History of Mathematics' (4th edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball.

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born at Auxerre on March 21, 1768, and died at Paris on May 16, 1830. He was the son of a tailor, and was educated by the Benedictines. The commissions in the scientific corps of the army were, as is still the case in Russia, reserved for those of good birth, and being thus ineligible he accepted a military lectureship on mathematics. He took a prominent part in his own district in promoting the revolution, and was rewarded by an appointment in 1795 in the Normal school, and subsequently by a chair in the Polytechnic school.

Fourier went with Napoleon on his Eastern expedition in 1798, and was made governor of Lower Egypt. Cut off from France by the English fleet, he organized the workshops on which the French army had to rely for their munitions of war. He also contributed several mathematical papers to the Egyptian Institute which Napoleon founded at Cairo, with a view of weakening English influence in the East. After the British victories and the capitulation of the French under General Menou in 1801, Fourier returned to France, and was made prefect of Grenoble, and it was while there that he made his experiments on the propagation of heat. He moved to Paris in 1816. In 1822 he published his Théorie analytique de la chaleur, in which he bases his reasoning on Newton's law of cooling, namely, that the flow of heat between two adjacent molecules is proportional to the infinitely small difference of their temperatures. In this work he shows that any functions of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable - a result which is constantly used in modern analysis. Lagrange had given particular cases of the theorem, and had implied that the method was general, but he had not pursued the subject. Dirichlet was the

The following is from The Fourier Transform and Its Application, by Ronald N. Bracewell, McGraw-Hill, 1986,pp 462-464.

Baron Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (March 21 1768-May 16, 1830), born in poor circumstances in Auxerre, introduced the idea that an arbitrary function, even one defined by different analytic expressions in adjacent segments of its range (such as a staircase waveform), could nevertheless be represented by a single analytic expression. This idea encountered resistance at the time I but has proved to be central to many later developments in mathematics science, and engineering. It is at the heart of the electrical engineering curriculum today. Fourier came upon his idea in connection with the problem of the flow of heat in solid bodies, including the earth.

The formula

x/2 = sin x - (sin 2x)/2 + (sin 3x)/3 + · · ·

was published by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) before Fourier’s work began, so you might like to ponder the question why Euler did not receive the credit for Fourier’s series.

Fourier was obsessed with heat. keeping his rooms uncomfortably hot for visitors, while also wearing a heavy coat himself Some traced this eccentricity back to his 3 years in Egypt where he sent in 1798 with the 165 savants on Napolean's expedition to civilize the country.

Prior to the expedition Fourier was a simple professor of mathematics but he now assumed administrative duties as secretary of the Institut d'Égypte a scientific body that met in the harem of the palace of the Beys Fourier worked on the theory of equations at this time but his competence at administration led to political and diplomatic assignments that h e also discharged with success. It should be recalled that the ambitious studies in geography archaeology. medicine, agriculture, natural history and so on were being carried out at a time when Napoleon was fighting Syrians in Palestine, repelling Turkish invasions, hunti

French mathematician and physicist (1768–1830)

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (;French:[ʒɑ̃batistʒozɛffuʁje]; 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre, Burgundy and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

Biography

Fourier was born in Auxerre (now in the Yonnedépartement of France), the son of a tailor. He was orphaned at the age of nine. Fourier was recommended to the Bishop of Auxerre and, through this introduction, he was educated by the Benedictine Order of the Convent of St. Mark. The commissions in the scientific corps of the army were reserved for those of good birth, and being thus ineligible, he accepted a military lectureship on mathematics. He took a prominent part in his own district in promoting the French Revolution, serving on the local Revolutionary Committee. He was imprisoned briefly during the Terror but, in 1795, was appointed to the École Normale and subsequently succeeded Joseph-Louis Lagrange at the École Polytechnique.

Fourier accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his Egyptian expedition in 1798, as scientific adviser, and was appointed secretary of the Institut d'Égypte. Cut off from France by the British fleet, he organized the workshops on which the French army had to rely for their munitions of war. He also contributed several mathematical papers to the Egyptian Institute (also called the Cairo Institute) which Napoleon founded at Cairo, with a view of weakening British influence in the East. After the British victories and the capitulation of the French under General Menou in 1801, Fourier returned to France.

French mathematician, known also as an Egyptologist and administrator, who exerted strong influence on mathematical physics through his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822; The Analytical Theory of Heat). He showed how the conduction of heat in solid bodies may be analyzed in terms of infinite mathematical series now called by his name, the Fourier series. Far transcending the particular subject of heat conduction, his work stimulated research in mathematical physics, which has since been often identified with the solution of boundary-value problems, encompassing many natural occurrences such as sunspots, tides, and the weather. His work also had a great influence on the theory of functions of a real variable, one of the main branches of modern mathematics.

After his return to France, Fourier was charged with the publication of the enormous mass of Egyptian