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| Scientist: Baron Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier |
French mathematician (1768–1830)
Fourier, the son of a tailor from Auxerre in France, was educated at the local military school and later at the Ecole Normale in Paris. He held posts at both the Ecole Normale and the Ecole Polytechnique where he was a very effective and influential teacher. In 1798 he accompanied Napoleon on the invasion of Egypt and later contributed to and oversaw the publication of the Description de l'Egypte (1808–25), a massive compilation of the cultural and scientific materials brought back from the expedition.
Fourier's most important mathematical work is contained in his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822; The Analytical Theory of Heat), a pioneering analysis of the conduction of heat in solid bodies in terms of infinite trigonometric series, now known as Fourier series. Fourier was led to consider these series when attempting to solve certain boundary-value problems in physics and his interest was always in the physical applications of mathematics rather than in its development for its own sake. His work continues to be extremely important in many areas of mathematical physics, but it has also been developed and generalized to yield a whole new branch of mathematical analysis, namely, the theory of harmonic analysis.
| Biography: Baron Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier |
The French mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph, Baron Fourier (1768-1830), was the first to discuss in a comprehensive manner the various aspects of the flow of heat in bodies.
On March 21, 1768, J.B.J. Fourier was born in Auxerre. At the age of 8 he lost his father, but the bishop of Auxerre secured his admission to the local military school conducted by Benedictine monks. After 2 years (1787-1789) in the novitiate of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, he left to serve as a lay teacher in his former school at Auxerre.
In 1789 Fourier's first memoir on the numerical solution of algebraic equations was read before the French Academy of Sciences. In 1794 a central teachers' college (École Normale) was established in Paris, and Fourier was one of its first students, but before long he was promoted to the faculty as lecturer. He then received an appointment to the newly founded École Polytechnique, where he first served as chief lecturer on fortifications and later as professor of mathematical analysis.
Fourier was 30 when Napoleon requested his participation as scientific adviser on an expedition to Egypt. Fourier served from 1798 to 1802 as secretary of the Institut d'Égypte, established by Napoleon to explore systematically the archeological riches of that ancient land. His papers, published in the Décade and the Courrier d'Égypte, showed him to be preoccupied with problems that ranged from the general solution of algebraic equations to irrigation projects.
Fourier proved himself a tactful diplomat, and upon his return to France Napoleon appointed him perfect of the department of lsère, 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 earned him lasting fame. Its first draft was submitted to the academy in 1807; a second, much expanded version, which received the award of the academy in 1812, was entitled Théorie des mouvements de la chaleur dans les corps solides. The first part of it 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 the mathematical techniques which later were developed into a special branch of mathematics - Fourier analysis and Fourier integrals.
From 1815 Fourier served as director of the Bureau of Statistics in Paris. In the eyes of the new, royalist regime, Fourier's long service under Napoleon was offset by his opposition to Napoleon upon the latter's return from Elba. In 1817 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences and served from 1822 as its perpetual secretary.
During the course of his career Fourier wrote several papers on statistics, but his lifelong love was the theory of algebraic equations on which he had just completed the manuscript of a book, Analyse des équations déterminées, and a lengthy memoir when he died in Paris on May 16, 1830.
Further Reading
The most detailed biography of Fourier in English is in François Arago, Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (trans. 1857). A later biography of Fourier is in Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics (1937). The subsequent development and use of Fourier's outstanding contribution to mathematical physics is given in detail in H.S. Carslaw, Introduction to the Theory of Fourier's Series and Integrals (1906; 3d ed. 1930). Dirk J. Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics (1948; 3d rev. ed. 1967), is recommended for general background.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Baron Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier |
| Wikipedia: Joseph Fourier |
| Joseph Fourier | |
|---|---|
 Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
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| Born | 21 March 1768 Auxerre, Yonne, France |
| Died | 16 May 1830 (aged 62) Paris, France |
| Residence | France |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Mathematician, physicist, and historian |
| Institutions | École Normale École Polytechnique |
| Alma mater | École Normale |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Lagrange |
| Doctoral students | Gustav Dirichlet Giovanni Plana Claude-Louis Navier |
| Known for | Fourier series Fourier transform Fourier's law of conduction |
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their application to problems of heat transfer. The Fourier transform and Fourier's Law are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.[1]
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Fourier was born at Auxerre (now in the Yonne département of France), the son of a tailor. He was orphaned at age ten. Fourier was recommended to the Bishop of Auxerre, and through this introduction, he was educated by the Benvenistes of the Convent of St. Mark. The commissions in the scientific corps of the army were reserved for those of good birth, and being thus ineligible, he accepted a military lectureship on mathematics. He took a prominent part in his own district in promoting the French Revolution, and was rewarded by an appointment in 1795 in the École Normale Supérieure, and subsequently by a chair at the École Polytechnique.
Fourier went with Napoleon Bonaparte on his Egyptian expedition in 1798, and was made governor of Lower Egypt and secretary of the Institut d'Égypte. Cut off from France by the English fleet, he organized the workshops on which the French army had to rely for their munitions of war. He also contributed several mathematical papers to the Egyptian Institute (also called the Cairo Institute) which Napoleon founded at Cairo, with a view of weakening English influence in the East. After the British victories and the capitulation of the French under General Menou in 1801, Fourier returned to France, and was made prefect of Isère, and it was while there that he made his experiments on the propagation of heat.
Fourier moved to England in 1816. Later he returned to France, and in 1822 succeeded Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre as Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1830, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1822 he published his Théorie analytique de la chaleur, in which he bases his reasoning on Newton's law of cooling, namely, that the flow of heat between two adjacent molecules is proportional to the extremely small difference of their temperatures. In this work he claims that any function of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. Though this result is not correct, Fourier's observation that some discontinuous functions are the sum of infinite series was a breakthrough. The question of determining when a Fourier series converges has been fundamental for centuries. Joseph Louis Lagrange had given particular cases of this (false) theorem, and had implied that the method was general, but he had not pursued the subject. Johann Dirichlet was the first to give a satisfactory demonstration of it with some restrictive conditions. A more subtle, but equally fundamental, contribution is the concept of dimensional homogeneity in equations; i.e. an equation can only be formally correct if the dimensions match on either side of the equality. Fourier also developed dimensional analysis, the method of representing physical units, such as velocity and acceleration, by their fundamental dimensions of mass, time, and length, to obtain relations between them.[2]
Fourier left an unfinished work on determinate equations which was edited by Claude-Louis Navier and published in 1831. This work contains much original matter — in particular, there is a demonstration of Fourier's theorem on the position of the roots of an algebraic equation. Joseph Louis Lagrange had shown how the roots of an algebraic equation might be separated by means of another equation whose roots were the squares of the differences of the roots of the original equation. François Budan, in 1807 and 1811, had enunciated the theorem generally known by the name of Fourier, but the demonstration was not altogether satisfactory. Fourier's proof is the same as that usually given in textbooks on the theory of equations. The final solution of the problem was given in 1829 by Jacques Charles François Sturm.
Fourier believed that keeping the body wrapped up in blankets was beneficial to the health. He died in 1830 when he tripped and fell down the stairs at his home.[3]
Fourier was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, a tomb decorated with an Egyptian motif to reflect his position as secretary of the Cairo Institute, and his collation of the landmark Description de l'Égypte.
Fourier is also credited with the discovery in 1824 that gases in the atmosphere might increase the surface temperature of the Earth.[4] This was the effect that would later be called the greenhouse effect. He described the phenomenon in 1824[5] and then again in a very similar paper in 1827[6] whereby an atmosphere serves to warm a planet.[7] This established the concept of planetary energy balance — that planets obtain energy from a number of sources that cause temperature increase. Planets also lose energy by infrared radiation (that Fourier called "chaleur obscure" or "dark heat") with the rate increasing with temperature. A balance is reached between heat gain and heat loss; the atmosphere shifts the balance toward the higher temperatures by slowing the heat loss. Although Fourier understood that the rate of infrared radiation increased with temperature, the Stefan–Boltzmann law which gives the exact form of this dependency (a fourth-power law) was not discovered until fifty years later, while Planck's law, which refines this dependency to include wavelength, took a further twenty years.
Fourier recognized that Earth primarily gets energy from Solar radiation, to which the atmosphere is largely transparent, and that geothermal heat doesn't contribute much to the energy balance. However, he mistakenly believed that there is a significant contribution of radiation from interplanetary space.
Fourier referred to an experiment by M de Saussure, who exposed a black box to sunlight. When a thin sheet of glass is put on top of the box, the temperature inside of the box increases [1].
Infrared radiation had been discovered by William Herschel in 1800. Fourier was familiar with Herschel's work, as indicated by the fact that he delivered a lecture in praise of Herschel in 1824. [2]
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| Preceded by Pierre-Édouard Lémontey |
Seat 5 Académie française 1826–1830 |
Succeeded by Victor Cousin |
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