Pierre-Simon Laplace

Born

March 23, 1749

Died

March 5, 1827 (aged 77)

Known as

mathematician, astronomer, physicist, politician, philosopher, university teacher

Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace was a French polymath, a scholar whose work has been instrumental in the fields of physics, astronomy, mathematics, engineering, statistics, and philosophy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique céleste (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. Laplace also popularized and further confirmed Sir Isaac Newton's work. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.

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