Michel Chasles

Michel Floréal Chasles (miʃɛl flɔʁeal ʃal; 15 November 1793 – 18 December 1880) was a French mathematician. He was born at Épernon in France and studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris under Siméon Denis Poisson. In the War of the Sixth Coalition he was drafted to fight in the defence of Paris in 1814. After the war, he gave up on a career as an engineer or stockbroker in order to pursue his mathematical studies. In 1837 he published the book Aperçu historique sur l'origine et le développement des méthodes en géométrie ("Historical view of the origin and development of methods in geometry"), a study of the method of reciprocal polars in projective geometry. The work gained him considerable fame and respect and he was appointed Professor at the École Polytechnique in 1841, then he was awarded a chair at the Sorbonne in 1846. A second edition of this book was published in 1875. In 1839, Ludwig Adolph Sohncke (the father of Leonhard Sohncke) translated the original into German as Geschichte der geometrie, hauptsachlich mit bezug auf die neueren methoden. Shortly thereafter, in 1841, Charles Graves published an English version as Two Geometrical Memoirs on the General Properties of Cones of the Second Degree and on the Spherical Conics, adding a significant amount of original material. Jakob Steiner had proposed Steiner's conic problem of enumerating the number of conic sections tangent to each of five given conics and had answered it incorrectly. Chasles developed a theory of characteristics that enabled the correct enumeration of the conics (there are 3264) (see enumerative geometry). He established several important theorems (all called Chasles's theorem). In kinematics, Chasles's description of a Euclidean motion in space as screw displacement was seminal to the development of the theories of dynamics of rigid bodies. Chasles was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864. In 1865 he was awarded the Copley Medal.