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Jean Paul de Gua de Malves

 

 
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Jean Paul de Gua de Malves
 
 
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Jean Paul de Gua de Malves (Carcassonne
Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a defensive wall France town in the Aude D?partement in France, of which it is the prefecture, in the Provinces of France of Languedoc....
, 1713 – June 2, 1785 Paris
Paris

Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
) was a French
France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
 mathematician
Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and/or research is the field of mathematics....
 who published in 1740 a work on analytical geometry in which he applied it, without the aid of differential calculus
Differential calculus

Differential calculus, a field in mathematics, is the study of how function s change when their inputs change. The primary object of study in differential calculus is the derivative....
, to find the tangent
Tangent

In geometry, the tangent line to a curve at a given Point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point . As it passes through the point of tangency, the tangent line is "going in the same direction" as the curve, and in this sense it is the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point....
s, asymptote
Asymptote

An asymptote of a real-valued function is a curve which describes the behavior of as either or tends to infinity.In other words, as one moves along the graph of in some direction, the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify, and as the x or y values approach infinity, the...
s, and various singular points
Mathematical singularity

In mathematics, a singularity is in general a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point of an exceptional Set where it fails to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as derivative....
 of an algebraic curve
Algebraic curve

In algebraic geometry, an algebraic curve is an algebraic variety of dimension of an algebraic variety one. The theory of these curves in general was quite fully developed in the nineteenth century, after many particular examples had been considered, starting with circles and other conic sections....
.

He further showed how singular points and isolated loops were affected by conical projection. He gave the proof of Descartes's rule of signs which is to be found in most modern works.






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Jean Paul de Gua de Malves (Carcassonne
Carcassonne

Carcassonne is a defensive wall France town in the Aude D?partement in France, of which it is the prefecture, in the Provinces of France of Languedoc....
, 1713 – June 2, 1785 Paris
Paris

Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
) was a French
France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
 mathematician
Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and/or research is the field of mathematics....
 who published in 1740 a work on analytical geometry in which he applied it, without the aid of differential calculus
Differential calculus

Differential calculus, a field in mathematics, is the study of how function s change when their inputs change. The primary object of study in differential calculus is the derivative....
, to find the tangent
Tangent

In geometry, the tangent line to a curve at a given Point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point . As it passes through the point of tangency, the tangent line is "going in the same direction" as the curve, and in this sense it is the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point....
s, asymptote
Asymptote

An asymptote of a real-valued function is a curve which describes the behavior of as either or tends to infinity.In other words, as one moves along the graph of in some direction, the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify, and as the x or y values approach infinity, the...
s, and various singular points
Mathematical singularity

In mathematics, a singularity is in general a point at which a given mathematical object is not defined, or a point of an exceptional Set where it fails to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as derivative....
 of an algebraic curve
Algebraic curve

In algebraic geometry, an algebraic curve is an algebraic variety of dimension of an algebraic variety one. The theory of these curves in general was quite fully developed in the nineteenth century, after many particular examples had been considered, starting with circles and other conic sections....
.

He further showed how singular points and isolated loops were affected by conical projection. He gave the proof of Descartes's rule of signs which is to be found in most modern works. It is not clear whether Descartes ever proved it strictly, and Newton
Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, Fellow of the Royal Society was an English people physicist, mathematician, Astronomy, Natural philosophy, Alchemy, and Theology and one of the the 100 in human history....
 seems to have regarded it as obvious.

The Abbé Jean-Paul de Gua de Malves was acquainted with many of the French philosophés during the last decades of the Ancien Régime. He was an early, short-lived, participant, then editor (later replaced by Diderot) of the project that ended up as the great Encylopédie
Encyclopédie

Encyclop?die, ou dictionnaire raisonn? des sciences, des arts et des m?tiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives....
.

Condorcet claimed that it was in fact the Abbé who recruited Diderot to the project, though this claim has never been verified. In either case, Jean-Paul and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Jean le Rond d'Alembert

Jean le Rond d'Alembert was a France mathematician, mechanics, physicist and philosopher. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclop?die....
, also thought to have been recruited by the Abbé, first show up on the December 1746 payroll of the publishers who were backing the Encylopédie project. Diderot was added just weeks later and took over as editor on 16 October 1747. At the funeral of the "profound geometrician", as Diderot called him, the eulogy was given by Condorcet.

See also

  • De Gua's theorem
    De Gua's theorem

    De Gua's theorem is a spatial analog of the Pythagorean theorem and named for Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. If a tetrahedron has a right-angle corner , then the square of the area of the face opposite the right-angle corner is the sum of the squares of the areas of the other three faces....