Pierre-louis moreau de maupertuis biography

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, writer and polymath of the Enlightenment. As typical for the period, he worked in many fields of natural sciences. His role as the leader of an expedition to the far north had a significant impact on his identity.

Roots

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany, on the west coast of France in 1698. His father was a sea captain and corsaire, a privateer legitimised by the King. His noble family invested in the education of their gifted son, training him mathematics, philosophy, music and in military sciences.

Persona

Maupertuis was an ambitious and socially adept scientist who wanted to make a name for himself not only in academic circles but also in the eyes of the general public. Maupertuis knew the art of flattery in the company of noblewomen and kings alike. He was a figure celebrated by social circles and the philosophical elite, who were careful about their public image.

Career

Maupertuis was elected to the French Académie des sciences at the age of 25 in 1723. The expedition to the Torne Valley in 1736–1737 was one of the turning points in his career. After the journey, Maupertuis received a shower of honours and attracted the attention of King Frederick II the Great of Prussia. In 1745, Maupertuis moved to Berlin to head the Royal Prussian Academy of Science. In his studies, Maupertuis was interested in Newton’s natural philosophy (La Figure de la Terre, 1738), procreation (Vénus physique, 1745) and metaphysics (Essai de cosmologie, 1749).

Conflicts

Maupertuis was involved in several personal and academic conflicts during his life. One of the most important was between Maupertuis and his former friend, the writer and philosopher Voltaire. The public dispute also involved the Prussian King Frederick II the Great, who prominently defended Maupertuis.

Death

In his last years, Maup

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, 1698-1759.

The "French Newton", Maupertuis was one of France's foremost astronomers, physicists, geographers, biologists and mathematicians of the Enlightenment period.  

Originally a soldier, Maupertuis became acquainted with the work of Sir Isaac Newton during a journey to England in 1728.  It was Maupertuis who was responsible for bringing Newton's work to a wider audience on the Continent  (esp. with his 1732 work) and thereby making him the poster boy of the Enlightenment spirit.  He was the tutor of Madame du Châtelet (the translator of Newton's Principia and Voltaire's mistress).  In 1736-7, Maupertuis led a famous expedition to Lapland to measure the degree of the meridien and thereby proving the Newtonian conjecture about the flattening of the globe at the poles.  

In 1745, he was invited by Frederick of Prussia to head the royal academy of sciences in Berlin.  His activities there attracted numerous scholars and scientists, making Berlin one of the poles of the Enlightenment age.  In 1744, Maupertuis provided a new formulation of Fermat's "principle of least action", which was later taken up by Euler, Lagrange and Hamilton (it also led to a protracted controversy with Samuel König).   Maupertuis's 1745 work promulgates an early version of the theory of evolution and his 1751 work on hereditary traits presages the modern notion of dominant and recessive genes.  Jealous of his prominence in Prussian society, Voltaire's acerbic wit (esp. Diatribe du Docteur Akakia and Micromégas) made life in Berlin quite uncomfortable for Maupertuis .  Maupertuis's 1768 works on linguistics were critically reviewed by Jacques Turgot.

Maupertuis's presence on this website is mainly due to his philosophy of "negative hedonism" (1749).  Like Locke and Maupertuis conceived of the pleasure/pain calculus in an asymmetri

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (; French: [mopɛʁtɥi]; 1698 – 27 July 1759) was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.

Maupertuis made an expedition to Lapland to determine the shape of the Earth. He is often credited with having invented the principle of least action; a version is known as Maupertuis's principle – an integral equation that determines the path followed by a physical system. His work in natural history is interesting in relation to modern science, since he touched on aspects of heredity and the struggle for life.

References

After four years, in 1723, he returned to Paris and was elected top the Paris Academy of Sciences as an adjoint for Geometry. In 1724 he published a treatise of the mathematics of musical instruments.

In 1728 he travelled to London and was made a member of the Royal Academy, and in 1729, travelled to Basel to study mechanics and differential calculus with Johann Bernoulli (I).

In the early 1730s, Maupertuis got interested in the exact figure of planet Earth, i.e. the deviation from the spherical shape, as well as the figures of celestial bodies. Following Newtonian mechanics, he thought these bodies should be of ellipsoidal shape. In his treatise of the figures of the celestial bodies (Maupertuis 1734), he included a translation to French of Derham's catalog of "Nebulae."

In 1735, the Paris Academy sent two expeditions for investigating this thread, the first, under the direction of Charles-Marie de la Condamine, went to Peru and Ecuador, the second one, commanded by Maupertuis, to Lapland. Surveying work was done in 1736; despite considerable errors, the results demonstrated the oblateness of Earth's shape.

In 1741, he became Vice President of the Paris Academy, and little later was made this academy's President. But academic dispute and quarrel ended in his soon dismission. In 1745, he went to Berlin to become director of the Royal Academy there. Again, he got involved in academic trouble; this trouble together with increasing health problems caused him to leave.

He returned to France, but soon travelled to Basel where he stayed until his death on July 27, 1759 in the house of Joha