Germinal Pierre Dandelin

Germinal Pierre Dandelin was a French mathematician, soldier and professor of engineering, born on 12 April 1794 near Paris to a French father and a Belgian mother and dead on 15 February 1847. He studied first at Ghent, then at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, was wounded fighting under Napoleon, and worked for the Ministry of the Interior under Lazare Carnot. He later became a citizen of the Netherlands, a professor of mining engineering in Belgium and a member of the Belgian army. His name survives in the Dandelin spheres, in Dandelin's theorem in geometry, and in the Dandelin-Graeffe numerical method for solving algebraic equations, and he also published on stereographic projection, algebra and probability theory.