José Echegaray

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, politician and one of the leading dramatists of the last quarter of the 19th century, born in Madrid in 1832. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of compositions that revived the great traditions of Spanish drama. He first gained his love of mathematics at the Murcia Institute, read Gauss, Legendre and Lagrange as a child and left the Madrid engineering school at twenty with a civil engineering degree, first in his class. From 1854 to 1868 he taught mathematics, stereotomy, hydraulics, descriptive geometry and differential and physical calculus there, and his Problemas de geometría analítica of 1865 and Teorías modernas de la física of 1867 were held in some regard.