Work
Gergonne was the first mathematician to employ the word polar. In a series of papers beginning in 1810, he discovered the principle of duality in projective geometry, by noticing that every theorem in the plane connecting points and lines corresponds to another theorem in which points and lines are interchanged, provided that the theorem embodied no metrical notions. In 1816, he devised an elegant solution to the problem of Apollonius: find a circle which touches three given circles.
In 1813, Gergonne wrote the prize-winning essay for the Bordeaux Academy, Methods of synthesis and analysis in mathematics, unpublished to this day and known only via a summary. The essay is very revealing of Gergonne's philosophical ideas. He called for the abandonment of the words analysis and synthesis, claiming they lacked clear meanings. Surprisingly for a geometer, he suggested that algebra is more important than geometry, at a time when algebra consisted almost entirely of the elementary algebra of the real field. He predicted that one day quasi-mechanical methods would be used to discover new results.
In 1815, Gergonne wrote the first paper on the optimal design of experiments for polynomial regression. According to S. M. Stigler, Gergonne is the pioneer of optimal design as well as response surface methodology.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Diaz Gergonne
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; one will transform and blend them to make a work that is all one’s own, that is, one’s judgement. Education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)