Mistaken Identity
For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in 2005, books, paintings and articles have incorrectly printed the side-view portrait of Louis Legendre shown above as that of the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833). The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre". The error only came to light when a 1820 book containing the sketches of seventy-three famous French mathematicians was discovered in 2005.
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