Louis François Antoine Arbogast (October 4, 1759 - April 8,or April 18, 1803) was a French mathematician. He was born at Mutzig in Alsace and died at Strasbourg, where he was professor. He wrote on series and the derivatives known by his name: he was the first writer to separate the symbols of operation from those of quantity. October 4 is the 277th day of the year (278th in Leap years). ... 1759 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... April 8 is the 98th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (99th in leap years). ... April 18 is the 108th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (109th in leap years). ... 1803 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... A mathematician is a person whose area of study and research is mathematics. ... Located at the entrance of the Bruche Valley the town enjoyed certain renown until the French Revolution. ... ‹The template below has been proposed for deletion. ... City motto: – City proper (commune) Région Alsace Département Bas-Rhin (67) Mayor Fabienne Keller (UMP) (since 2001) Area 78. ...

He was professor of mathematics at the Collège de Colmar and entered a mathematical competition which was run by the St Petersburg Academy. His entry was to bring him fame and an important place in the history of the development of the calculus. Arbogast submitted an essay to the St Petersburg Academy in which he came down firmly on the side of Euler. In fact he went much further than Euler in the type of arbitrary functions introduced by integrating, claiming that the functions could be discontinuous not only in the limited sense claimed by Euler, but discontinuous in a more general sense that he defined that allowed the function to consist of portions of different curves. Arbogast won the prize with his essay and his notion of discontinuous function became important in Cauchy's more rigorous approach to analysis. Houses on a canal, Colmar Location within France Colmar is a city and commune in the Haut-Rhin département of Alsace, France. ... Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербу́рг, English transliteration: Sankt-Peterburg), colloquially known as Питер (transliterated Piter), formerly known as Leningrad (Ленингра́д, 1924–1991) and Petrograd (Петрогра́д, 1914–1924), is a city located in Northwestern Russia on the delta of the river Neva at the east end of the Gulf of Finland... Leonhard Euler aged 49 (oil painting by Emanuel Handmann, 1756) Leonhard Euler (April 15, 1707 - September 18, 1783) (pronounced oiler) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist. ... Augustin Louis Cauchy Augustin Louis Cauchy (August 21, 1789 – May 23, 1857) was a French mathematician. ...

In 1789 he submitted in Strasbourg a major report on the differential and integral calculus to the Académie des Sciences in Paris which was never published. In the Preface of a later work he described the ideas that prompted him to write the major report of 1789. Essentially he realised that there was no rigorous methods to deal with the convergence of series, and Arbogast's career reached new heights. In addition to his mathematics post, he was appointed as professor of physics at the Collège Royal in Strasbourg and from April 1791 he served as its rector until October 1791 when he was appointed rector of the University of Strasbourg; in 1794 he was appointed Professor of Calculus at the École centrale (soon to become the École polytechnique) but he taught at the École préparatoire. The French Academy of Sciences (Académie des sciences) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ... The cadets of Polytechnique rushed to the defense of Paris against the foreign armies in 1814. ...

His contributions to mathematics show him as a philosophical thinker that has to face his era. As well as introducing discontinuous functions, as we discussed above, he conceived the calculus as operational symbols. The formal algebraic manipulation of series investigated by Lagrange and Laplace in the 1770s has been put in the form of operator equalities by Arbogast in 1800. We owe him the general concept of factorial as a product of a finite number of terms in arithmetic progression. Joseph Louis Lagrange Joseph Louis Lagrange (January 25, 1736 – April 10, 1813) was an Italian mathematician and astronomer who later lived in France and Prussia. ... Pierre-Simon Laplace Pierre-Simon Laplace (March 23, 1749 – March 5, 1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer, the discoverer of the Laplace transform and Laplaces equation. ...

The original version of this article was taken from the public domain resource the Rouse History of Mathematics. Shortcut: WP:PD There are many resources available on the net that are in the public domain, and therefore freely usable without restrictions for Wikipedia content. ... See also: wikipedia:history One of Wikipedias public domain resources! There are a series of articles transcribed by Dr. David R. Wilkins (dwilkins@maths. ...

External links

• Biography at the MacTutor archive