Fourier,+Joseph



Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born on March 21, 1768 in Auxerre, France. He was a mathematician, physicist and historian. Fourier was orphaned at the age of 9, after both his parents died a year apart. Artillery and engineers, branches of the army, called to him. But after he was for some reason turned down for those, he went to a Benedictine school at St. Benoit-sur-Loire. After being recruited into the French Revolution, he returned in 1789 to a teaching position at his old school in Auxerre. While the Revolution was still underway, Fourier was arrested for participating in local affairs defending the victims of terror in 1794. A year later, he was appointed ‘administrateur de police’, meaning assistant lecturer, to Ecole Polytechnique. Gaspard Monge soon later asked Fourier to join Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. In 1801, Fourier returned to France, and was made the prefect of Grenoble. Many years later, 1814, was a low point in his life; he had no job, a low political reputation, and only a small pension. Fourier moved to Paris and was elected to the reconstitutes Academie de Sciences in 1816. Some 8 years later, in 1822, Fourier was elected the position of secretaire perptuel of the Academie de Sciences, then in 1827 for a second time. Also in 1822, he published his Throrie analytique da la chaleur. In his later years, Fourier caught Myxedema as a result of going to Egypt. On May 4th, 1830 he fell down a flight of stairs and allowed the symptoms of falling to progressively get worse until he died 12 days later, on May 16th, 1830. Fourier was buried in the eighteenth division of the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, A whole 138 years later in 1968, his birth was celebrated, and a school in his hometown of Auxerre was renamed in Lycee Fourier. [305 words]

Even as a child, Joseph Fourier felt the calling for mathematics. Most of his achievements lie in the study of diffusion of heat. Also, he had an interest in the theory of equations, but it’s not what he’s known for. What he was most known for was he Fourier transform, and the Fourier series. The Fourier series is used on functions that may be hard, or even impossible to analyze, and it’s used for the purpose of solving the heat equation in a metal plate. It required expressing the initial temperature distribution in certain bodies. On the other hand, the Fourier transform is something used to transform one function into another, called the frequency domain representation of the original function. In 1807, Fourier presented a paper to the Academy about heat diffusion between disjoint masses and in special continuous shapes like a rectangle, sphere, or prism, based on the diffusion equation. He was credited in 1824 with the discovery that gases in the atmosphere could possibly increase the surface temperature of the Earth, commonly known as the greenhouse effect. Though the claim he made that any function of a variable, whether it’s continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable was not correct, this hypothesis he made was a mathematical breakthrough. In Fourier’s Theorie analytique de la chaleur, he states that based on Newton’s law of cooling, that the flow of hear between two adjacent molecules is proportional to the extremely small difference of their temperatures. He established the concept of a planetary energy balance because plants absorb energy from a number of sources that cause temperature increase. Among many differences Fourier made in the mathematical world, he also saw long before anyone else that term-by-term integration of a given trigonometric series, to evaluate the coefficients, is no sure thing of it being right, and that a series being complete cannot be assumed. [321 words]

Jacy Quint