Jacques Ozanam (16 June 1640 in
Sainte-Olive,
Ain – 3 April 1718 in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
) was a French
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
.
Biography
Jacques Ozanam was born in
Sainte-Olive,
Ain, France.
In 1670, he published trigonometric and
logarithm
In mathematics, the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of to base is , because is to the rd power: . More generally, if , the ...
ic tables more accurate than the existing ones of
Ulacq,
Pitiscus, and
Briggs. An act of kindness in lending money to two strangers brought him to the attention of M. d'Aguesseau, father of the chancellor, and he secured an invitation to settle in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
. There he enjoyed prosperity and contentment for many years. He married, had a large family, and derived an ample income from teaching mathematics to private pupils, chiefly foreigners.
His mathematical publications were numerous and well received. ''Récréations'' (published 1694) was later translated into English and is well known today. He was elected a member of the
Académie des Sciences
The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...
in 1701. The death of his wife plunged him into deep sorrow, and the loss of his foreign pupils through the
War of the Spanish Succession
The War of the Spanish Succession was a European great power conflict fought between 1701 and 1714. The immediate cause was the death of the childless Charles II of Spain in November 1700, which led to a struggle for control of the Spanish E ...
reduced him to poverty. He died in Paris on April 3, 1718 (frequently cited as 1717 because of an error in "éloge de Fontenelle").
Ozanam was honoured more abroad than at home. He was devout, charitable, courageous, and of simple faith. As a young man he had overcome a passion for gambling. He was wont to say that it was for the doctors of the
Sorbonne to dispute, for the pope to decide, and for a mathematician to go to heaven in a perpendicular line.
He taught
Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre FRS (; 26 May 166727 November 1754) was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
He move ...
.
Selected works
* (1670)
* (1673)
* (1684)
* (1687)
*
* (1688)
* (1691)
* (Paris, 1693, 5 vols, tr. into English, London, 1712)
* (Paris, 1694)
* (1694, 2 vols, revised by
Montucla in 1778, 4 vols)
* (1698)
* (1699)
* (1702)
* (1711)
* (1711).
See also
*
VIII. Formulas for Generating Pythagorean Triples
References
*
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (; ; 11 February 1657
– 9 January 1757), also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author and an influential member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his ...
(1790
Eloge de Ozanam ''Oeuvres de Fontenelle'', Tome 6, p 506, link from
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
.
Sources
Ozanam, Jacques, (1844). Science and Natural Philosophy: Dr. Hutton’s Translation of Montucla’s edition of Ozanam, revised by Edward Riddle, Thomas Tegg, London
Read online- Cornell University
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ozanam, Jacques
1640 births
1718 deaths
People from Ain
17th-century French mathematicians
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
18th-century French mathematicians