Life
Adrien-Marie Legendre was born in Paris (or possibly, in Toulouse, depending on sources) on 18 September 1752 to a wealthy family. He was given an excellent education at the Collège Mazarin in Paris, defending his thesis in physics and mathematics in 1770. From 1775 to 1780 he taught at the École Militaire in Paris, and from 1795 at the École Normale, and was associated with the Bureau des longitudes. In 1782, he won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for his treatise on projectiles in resistant media, which brought him to the attention of Lagrange.
In 1783 he became an adjoint of the Académie des Sciences, and an associé in 1785. In 1789 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. During the French Revolution, in 1793, he lost his private fortune, but was able to put his affairs in order with the help of his wife, Marguerite-Claudine Couhin, whom he married in the same year. In 1795 he became one of the six members of the mathematics section of the reconstituted Académie des Sciences, named the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, and later, in 1803, of the Geometry section as reorganized under Napoleon. In 1824, as a result of refusing to vote for the government candidate at the Institut National, Legendre was deprived by the Ministre de L'Intérieur of the ultraroyalist government, the comte de Corbière, of his pension from the École Militaire, where he had served from 1799 to 1815 as mathematics examiner for graduating artillery students. This was partially reinstated with the change in government in 1828 and in 1831 he was made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur.
He died in Paris on 9 January 1833, after a long and painful illness. Legendre's widow made a cult of his memory, carefully preserving his belongings. Upon her death in 1856, she left their last country house to the village of Auteuil where the couple had lived and are buried.
His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
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