Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton

Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton (1736 to 1798, though Johann Samuel Ersch gave 10 February 1732 as his birth date) was a French mathematician, born in La Baroche-Gondouin near Lassay in the Mayenne. Born to poor parents, he taught himself mathematics and ship piloting at Nantes and then earned his living in Paris as a private tutor. He first became known for a Théorie de la vis d'Archimède (1768), from which he derived designs for new kinds of mills, and in 1780 he published a large Métrologie, a treatise on the measures, weights and coinage of the ancients and moderns, which became the model for later works on the subject. In 1781 he followed with a Théorie des lois de la nature on the communication of motion, in the spirit of Leibniz's criticism of the Cartesians. He held a chair of mathematics at Strasbourg, later worked as a calculator on the Connaissance des temps and was made a corresponding associate of the Institut de France shortly before his death in 1798.