AUGUSTIN LOUIS CAUCHY

cauchy

AUGUSTIN LOUIS CAUCHY was born on August 21, 1789, in Paris, the oldest of six children. By the time he was 11, both Laplace and Lagrange had recognised Cauchy's extraordinary talent for mathematics. In school he won prizes for Greek, Latin and the humanities. At the age of 21, he was given a comemission in Napoleon's army as a civil engineer. For the next few years, Cauchy attend to his engineering duties while carrying out brilliant mathematical research on the side.

You saw that little young man? Well! He will supplant all of us in so far as we are mathematicians.     

                                                                      SPOKEN BY LAGRANGE TO LAPLACE 

                                                                      ABOUT THE 11-YEAR-OLD CAUCHY

Cauchy stamp

       In 1815, at the age of 26, Cauchy was made Professor of Mathematics at the École polytechnique and was recognised as the leading mathematics in France. Cauchy and his contemporary Gauss were the last men to know the whole of mathematics as known at their time, and both made important contributions to nearly branch, both pure and applied, as well as to physics and astronomy.

     Cauchy introduced a new level of rigor into mathematical analysis. We owe our contemporary notions of limit and continuity to him. He gave the first proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Cauchy was the founder of complex function theory and a pioneer in the theory of permutation groups and determinants. His total written output of mathematics fills 24 large volumes and is second only to that of Euler. He wrote over 500 research papers after the age of 50. Cauchy died at the age of 67 on May 23, 1857.