François Peyrard

François Peyrard (1760–1822) was a French mathematician, educator and librarian. During the French Revolution, he was involved in the committee that reformed the French educational system. He was one of the founder of the École Polytechnique and its first librarian.

Biography and work

Born in Velay (now Haute-Loire), he was a student at the Collège of Le Puy-en-Velay. Refusing to become priest, he first enrolled in the Gardes françaises, then arrived in Paris in 1784 to start a career as mathematics teacher.

In 1793, he joined the committee in charge of reforming the educational system, where he met Vandermonde, Monge, Lagrange. He helped to found the École Polytechnique, for which he was the first librarian.

As mathematician, his main contributions are translations of Euclidean geometry due to his great skills in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. His translations of Euclid's Elements are still considered as the best existing in French.

Due to many personal conflicts, he left the Polytechnique, in 1804, just after the release of his first Euclid's Elements translation. In less than 10 years, he had purchased as librarian approximately ten thousand books.

He then became a teacher at the Lycée Condorcet (Lycée Bonaparte at that time) in Paris. In 1815 he published a revised edition of Bézout's arithmetical opus Cours de mathématiques, à l'usage de la marine et de l'artillerie.

He was the first to identify in 1808^[1] a previously unknown manuscript of Euclid called Vaticanus graecus 190, a missing part of Euclid’s works, that he dug out of Napoléon’s booty from the Vatican. He released in 1814 a revised edition of the Elements, reviewed by Delambre, Lagrange and Legendre.

He died destitute in 1822.

References

Citations

Sources

• Janis Langins, Histoire de la vie et des fureurs des François Peyrard, Bibliothécaire de l’École polytechnique de 1795 à 1804 et traducteur renommé d’Euclide et d’Archimède [archive], Bulletin de la SABIX n°3, 1989

Selected publications

• Peyrard, François. (Euclid's Elements,Euclidean Geometry) (1804)
• Peyrard, François. "(applied Arithmetics) (1815).
• Peyrard, François. Euclid's Elements (complete edition) , Paris 1814-1818 (in Greek, Latin and French)
  • Part 1, Part 2, Part 3