Most of his work was brought to perfection by others: his work on roots of polynomials inspired Galois theory; Abel's work on elliptic functions was built on Legendre's; some of Gauss' work in statistics and number theory completed that of Legendre.
In number theory, he conjectured the quadratic reciprocity law, subsequently proved by Gauss. He also did pioneering work on the distribution of primes, and on the application of analysis to number theory. His 1796 conjecture of the Prime number theorem was rigorously proved by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin in 1898.
Legendre did an impressive amount of work on elliptic functions, including the classification of elliptic integrals, but it took Abel's stroke of genius to study the inverses of Jacobi's functions and solve the problem completely.
In 1770, at the age of 18, Legendre defended his thesis in mathematics and physics at the Collège Mazarin but this was not quite as grand an achievement as it sounds to us today, for this consisted more of a plan of research rather than a completed thesis.
Legendre's work replaced Euclid's "Elements" as a textbook in most of Europe and, in succeeding translations, in the United States and became the prototype of later geometry texts.
Gauss was correct, but one could understand how hurtful Legendre must have found an attack on the rigour of his results by such a young man. Of course Gauss did not state that he was improving Legendre's result but rather claimed the result for himself since his was the first completely rigorous proof.
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