Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He acquired a considerable reputation as a contributor to and editor of the famous Encyclopédie.
Born the illegitimate son of a famous hostess in Paris, d’Alembert studied law, medicine, and mathematics at the College Mazarin. In 1743, he published Traite de Dynamique, developing the mathematical theory of Newtonian dynamics, including the principle named after him. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is also named after d’Alembert.
D’Alembert later worked on fluid motion, partial differential equations, the motion of vibrating strings, and celestial mechanics. Until 1758, he was philosopher Denis Diderot’s principal collaborator on the Encyclopédie, of which he was the scientific editor. He wrote the Discours Préliminaire des Éditeurs, proclaiming the philosophy of the French Enlightenment.
University of Washington-Seattle’s Thomas L Hankins wrote Jean d’Alembert: Science and Enlightenment (1970.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean le Rond d’Alembert
High office is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit, reptiles and eagles.
—Jean le Rond d’Alembert
The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.
—Jean le Rond d’Alembert
Topics: Action, Difficulty
If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can.
—Jean le Rond d’Alembert
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