Louis Bertrand (mathematician)

Louis Bertrand (3 October 1731 – 15 May 1812) was a Genevan mathematician.

Biography

Bertrand was born on 3 October 1731 in Geneva, Republic of Geneva, the son of Antoine Bertrand, a merchant and banker, and Madeleine Lafont.[1] He studied in Geneva and under Leonhard Euler in Berlin.[1] Bertrand was a professor of mathematics at the University of Geneva from 1761 to 1795, and was its rector in 1783.[1] He became a member of Geneva's Council of Two Hundred in 1784, and served in the National Assembly in 1795 during the Genevan revolutionary period.[1]

In 1778, Bertrand published the work Developpement nouveau de la partie elementaire des mathematiques, which included a demonstration of Euclid's postulates that gained fame before the rise of non-Euclidean geometry and influenced most of the elementary geometry treatises of the 19th century.[1] In 1774, he published the De l'instruction publique in open opposition to Horace Bénédict de Saussure's Projet de réforme pour le Collège de Genève.[1] He worked, besides in Geneva, also in Berlin, Bern, and London.[2] Bertrand died on 15 May 1812 in Geneva, aged 80.[1]

Works

  • Developpement nouveau de la partie elementaire des mathematiques (in French). Vol. 1. Genève: Isaac Bardin, Imprimerie de la Societé Typografique. 1778.
  • Developpement nouveau de la partie elementaire des mathematiques (in French). Vol. 2. Genève: Isaac Bardin, Jean Pierre Bonnant. 1778.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Fernando Vidal: Louis Bertrand in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, 24 September 2002.
  2. ^ "Bertrand, Louis". Consortium of European Research Libraries. 6 September 2022.
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