page_title: Adrien-Marie Legendre
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Adrien-Marie Legendre / Life
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Tombe d'Adrien-Marie Legendre, cimetière d'Auteuil, division 5.
context_page_description: Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him.
context_section_description: Adrien-Marie Legendre was born in Paris on 18 September 1752 to a wealthy family. He received his education at the Collège Mazarin in Paris, and defended his thesis in physics and mathematics in 1770. He taught at the École Militaire in Paris from 1775 to 1780 and at the École Normale from 1795. At the same time, he was associated with the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1782, the Berlin Academy awarded Legendre a prize for his treatise on projectiles in resistant media. This treatise also brought him to the attention of Lagrange.
  The Académie des sciences made Legendre an adjoint member in 1783 and an associate in 1785. In 1789, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
  He assisted with the Anglo-French Survey (1784–1790) to calculate the precise distance between the Paris Observatory and the Royal Greenwich Observatory by means of trigonometry. To this end in 1787 he visited Dover and London together with Dominique, comte de Cassini and Pierre Méchain. The three also visited William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus.
  Legendre lost his private fortune in 1793 during the French Revolution. That year, he also married Marguerite-Claudine Couhin, who helped him put his affairs in order. In 1795, Legendre became one of six members of the mathematics section of the reconstituted Académie des Sciences, renamed the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts. Later, in 1803, Napoleon reorganized the Institut National, and Legendre became a member of the Geometry section. From 1799 to 1812, Legendre served as mathematics examiner for graduating artillery students at the École Militaire and from 1799 to 1815 he served as permanent mathematics examiner for the École Polytechnique. In 1824, Legendre's pension from the École Militaire was stopped because he refused to vote for the government candidate at the Institut National. His pension was partially reinstated with the change in government in 1828. In 1831, he was made an officer of the Légion d'Honneur.
  Legendre died in Paris on 9 January 1833, after a long and painful illness, and Legendre's widow carefully preserved his belongings to memorialize him. Upon her death in 1856, she was buried next to her husband in the village of Auteuil, where the couple had lived, and left their last country house to the village. Legendre's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
caption: His grave at the Auteuil cemetery.
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