Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Biography of Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier He was born on March 21, 1768, in Auxerre. At the age of 8 he lost his father, but the Bishop of Auxerre secured his admission to the local military school run by Benedictine monks. After 2 years (1787-1789) in the novitiate of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, he began working as a lay teacher at his old school in Auxerre.

In 1789 the first essay by Fourier on the numerical solution of algebraic equations. In 1794 the central university of teachers and teachers was established in Paris. Fourier he was one of his first students, soon after he was promoted to the faculty as a professor. He was later called in by the newly founded Polytechnic School, where he served as a professor of mathematical analysis.

Fourier He was 30 years old when Napoleon Bonaparte requested his participation as a scientific advisor on an expedition to Egypt. Between 1798 and 1802 Fourier He was secretary of the Institut d’Égypte, established by Napoleon to systematically explore the archaeological riches of that ancient land. His works, published in Décade and the Courrier d’Egypte, showed that he was concerned with problems ranging from the general solution of algebraic equations to irrigation projects.

Fourier He proved to be a discreet diplomat, and on his return to France Napoleon appointed him prefect of the department of Isère, with Grenoble as its capital, where he served from 1801 to 1814. There he wrote the work on the mathematical theory of heat conduction, which it was worth lasting fame.

His first project was presented to the Academy in 1807; a second, greatly expanded version, which received the Academy Award in 1812, was titled Théorie des mouvements de la chaleur dans les corps solides. The first part was printed in book form in 1822 under the title Théorie analytique de la chaleur. It was a masterpiece, not only because it covered the hitherto unexplored field of heat propagation, but also because it contained mathematical techniques that would later be developed in a special branch of mathematics: the Fourier analysis and Fourier integrals.

Since 1815 Fourier he was director of the Paris Statistics Office. In 1817 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences and, from 1822, he was its permanent secretary.

During the course of your career, Fourier wrote several articles on statistics, but his predilection was in the theory of algebraic equations on which he had just finished a draft for a book, Analyze the determined equations, and a long memoir, when he died in Paris on May 16, 1830.