François Peyrard

François Peyrard (1760 to 1822) was a French mathematician, educator and librarian, known above all for his French translations of Greek geometry. Born in Velay, now Haute-Loire, and trained in Paris, he became a mathematics teacher in 1786 and embraced the French Revolution, joining the Jacobin Club. In 1793 he presented a project to reform French education to a commission of leading scientists, and he later helped Monge and Lagrange choose mathematics teachers for the new schools. He was a founder of the École Polytechnique and its first librarian from 1795, building a library of about ten thousand books before being dismissed in 1804 amid conflicts with the administration. He then taught at the Lycée Condorcet and published an edition of Euclid's Elements in Greek, Latin and French in 1814, still regarded as the best French translation, along with a complete Archimedes in 1807. In 1808 he identified the Vatican manuscript Vaticanus graecus 190 as a previously unknown Euclid text. He died in poverty in 1822.