Projective Geometry — Michel Chasles
Michel Chasles’ prodigious talent earned him international acclaim, but he suffered public embarrassment by failing to bring the rigors of mathematical proof into other areas of investigation. Chasles first gained wide recognition in 1837 for a historical account of methods in of geometry. As professor of mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique, Chasles continued the work of Gaspard Monge, Lazare Carnot, and Jean-Victor Poncelet in the area of projective geometry. This field of research is responsible for creating a number of mathematical tools essential to the engineering sciences, such as techniques for rendering engineering drawings, image analysis, and the representation of the motion and forces on three dimensional objects used in machine design, robotics, and in fluid dynamics. In 1851, Chasles was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1865, the Royal Society of London awarded Chasles with the Copley Medal, the Nobel Prize of the time. At his death, in 1880, Chasles was perhaps the best-known mathematician in Europe.
According to his biographers, Chasles devoted his life to the quiet pursuits of mathematics and teaching. But, Chasles lived in interesting times… In his senior year at the Ecole Polytechnique, 1814, Chasles joined fellow students to fight in the defense of Paris. And, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat, when new commissions for graduating students were in short supply, Chasles gave up his place so that another student, whose family was not as well off as his, could have a chance at a career in the military. Chasles’ father arranged a job in a stock brokerage, for which he had no aptitude. However, he did, apparently, take advantage of other opportunities open to a young man in Paris. Forty years later, after Chasles had achieved the distinction of membership in the Academy of Science, his staid colleagues were surprised to find Chasles in convivial conversation with a distinguished Hungarian lord, an apparent stranger met by chance. It seems that in their youth Chasles and the lord had shared an appreciation for the talents of a certain dancer, both on stage and off.
In 1867 Chasles fell victim to a fraud. An interest in the history of science led him to discover letters that, astonishingly, revealed it was Pascal, a French scientist, not Newton, an Englishman, who first articulated the mathematical law of gravity — a finding that was sure to inspire new respect for French science. The letters were part of a large stash of documents, including correspondence by other scientific notables from antiquity, that Chasles acquired from a “trusted source.” Somehow, Chasles missed obvious signs of a deception, such as the fact that all the writers used contemporary French, no matter their nationality or the purported age of the document. Embarrassment came when Chasles requested the Academy of Science to authenticate and publish the obviously bogus scientific correspondence. It took two years of rancorous debate before Chasles came to realize his error. Chasles’ embarrassment reminds us that the production of new knowledge requires insight and inspiration to be tempered with skepticism.
Michel Chasles is one of the 72 scientists and engineers named on the Eiffel Tower.
