Olinde Rodrigues

Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues, more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician and social reformer, born in 1795. He came from a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux and was awarded a doctorate in mathematics by the University of Paris on 28 June 1815; his dissertation contains the result now called Rodrigues' formula. He then became a banker and a close associate of the Comte de Saint-Simon, and after Saint-Simon's death in 1825 he continued to champion the older man's socialist ideals, known as Saint-Simonianism. In mathematics he is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula for the Legendre polynomials and the Euler-Rodrigues parameters. He died on 17 December 1851.