Jean Etienne Montucla
From LoveToKnow 1911
JEAN ETIENNE MONTUCLA (1725-1799), French mathematician, was born at Lyons on the 5th of September 1725. In 1 754 he published an anonymous treatise entitled Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle, and in 1758 the first part of his great work, Histoire des mathdmatiques, the first history of mathematics worthy of the name. He was appointed intendantsecretary of Grenoble in 1758, secretary to the expedition for colonizing Cayenne in 1764, and "premier commis des batiments" and censor-royal for mathematical books in 1765. The Revolution deprived him of his income and left him in great destitution. The offer in 1795 of a mathematical chair in one of the schools of Paris was declined on account of his infirm health, and he was still in straitened cirumstances in 1798, when he published a second edition of the first part of his Histoire. In 1778 he re-edited Jacques Ozanam's Recreations mathdmatiques, afterwards published in English by Charles Hutton (4 vols., London, 1803). He died on the 18th of December 1799. His Histoire was completed by J. J. Le F. de Lalande, and published at Paris in1799-1802(4 vols.).
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