Pierre Louis Maupertuis

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, usually written Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, was a French mathematician and natural philosopher, born at Saint-Malo in 1698. After a short career as a cavalry officer he studied mathematics in Paris and then under Johann Bernoulli at Basel, and in the early 1730s became one of the first in France to defend Newton's theory of gravitation. He led the Paris Academy's expedition to Lapland in 1736 to measure a degree along the meridian, and his results confirmed that the Earth is flattened at the poles. At the invitation of Frederick the Great he became the first president of the Berlin Academy, officially appointed in 1746. He is best known for formulating the principle of least action, which he first stated in 1746 and published in his Essai de cosmologie, and he also wrote on heredity and natural history. He died at Basel in 1759.