Augustin Cauchy
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031034
It’s the birthday of Augustin Cauchy, who was born in 1789 in Paris. Cauchy studied civil engineering at France’s national school for bridges and roads. He became a civil engineer, but as his interest in engineering waned, his interest in mathematics grew, and he went on to become a mathematician. Thanks perhaps to his grounding in technology, Cauchy tackled problems in applied mathematics. He strengthened the foundations of calculus, developed complex function theory and introduced the stress tensor to elasticity theory, among other contributions. In a lecture he gave in 1868 he explained what motivated him: “Very often the laws derived by physicists from a large number of observations are not rigorous, but approximate.”
Date in History: 21 August 1789
