Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński

Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1778 to 1853) was a Polish messianist philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, lawyer, occultist and economist. Born Hoëné in Wolsztyn, he trained as an army officer, fought in the Kościuszko Uprising, and from 1800 worked in France, where he spent most of his life in difficult material circumstances writing exclusively in French. In mathematics he is known for introducing a novel series expansion for a function in response to Lagrange, whose coefficients form the determinant Thomas Muir named the Wronskian in 1882. His claim of 1812 that every equation has an algebraic solution was wrong, as Paolo Ruffini had shown. Most of his work was dismissed in his lifetime, and he also pursued projects such as caterpillar-like vehicles, a longitude device and a perpetual motion machine. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1853.