Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) was an Italian-born French mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who made foundational contributions to analysis, number theory, and analytical and celestial mechanics. He served as the first professor of analysis at the École Polytechnique in Paris and was a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He is best known for transforming Newtonian mechanics into a branch of analysis through his treatise Mécanique analytique (1788), for developing the calculus of variations and Lagrangian mechanics, and for his work on the algebraic resolution of equations which anticipated group theory.
“Lagrange found the right kind of question to ask about this... the first time in history that people had the instinct that some kind of question about symmetry was the right way to be studying these polynomials.”
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