Mathematician:Adrien-Marie Legendre

1752 - 1833


 * French mathematician, focusing in the fields of statistics, abstract algebra, number theory, and mathematical analysis.


 * Has a moon crater named after him.


 * His work formed the basis for work by many others, including Gauss and Abel.


 * Gave an early proof of Fermat's Last Theorem for n=5


 * Conjectured the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, which was later proven by Gauss.

Nationality
French

History

 * Born: September 18, 1752
 * Died: January 10, 1833


 * Pioneered work on the distribution of primes and its application to number theory.
 * Known for the Legendre Transform, which is commonly used to go from the Lagrangian to the Hamiltonian Function in Classical Mechanics.
 * Conjectured the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, which was later proven by Gauss.
 * Developed the Least Squares Method for linear regression.
 * Discovered the Diophantine Equation $$ax^2 + by^2 + cz^2 = 0$$ which is known as the Legendre Equation

Theorems and Definitions

 * Legendre Symbol
 * Legendre Constant
 * Legendre Polynomial
 * Legendre Transformation

Books and Papers

 * "Éléments de Géométrie" (1794)