Joseph Diez Gergonne

Joseph Diez Gergonne was a French mathematician and logician, born at Nancy on 19 June 1771 and dead at Montpellier on 4 May 1859. He enlisted in the French army as a captain in 1791, fought at Valmy in 1792 and took part in the invasion of Spain in 1794, and in 1795 made a definitive move to civilian life by taking up the chair of transcendental mathematics at the new École centrale at Nîmes, where he came under the influence of Gaspard Monge. In 1810, after difficulty in publishing his work, he founded his own journal, the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées, which in twenty-two years published about two hundred of his own articles on geometry, his specialty, and others by Poncelet, Steiner, Plücker, Chasles, Dupin, Lamé and even Galois.