Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis

Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis (21 May 1792 to 19 September 1843) was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist, best known for his work on the supplementary forces detected in a rotating frame of reference, which led to the Coriolis effect. He was the first to apply the term travail, translated as work, to the transfer of energy by a force acting through a distance, and he prefixed the factor one half to Leibniz's concept of vis viva, thereby specifying kinetic energy in its present form. He was born in Paris in 1792, sat the entrance exam in 1808 and placed second of all the students entering that year, and in 1816 became a tutor at the École Polytechnique, where he did experiments on friction and hydraulics. In 1829 he published a textbook, Calcul de l'Effet des Machines.