Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
1698–1759, Saint-Malo, Kingdom of France, Basel, Switzerland
French mathematician, natural philosopher, and geodesist who advocated a principle of least action and led the Prussian Academy.
Born in Saint-Malo, Maupertuis first served in the military before turning to mathematics and astronomy in Paris. He joined the French expedition to Lapland in 1736–1737 to measure a meridian arc near the Arctic Circle; the results supported Newton's prediction that Earth is flattened at the poles.
From the 1740s he formulated versions of a principle of least action, seeking a unified statement of natural laws. In 1746 he became president of the Prussian Academy in Berlin. His principle played a historical role in the development of variational mechanics, though his original formulation differed from modern versions.
Workplaces: French Academy of Sciences, Paris, Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin
France