Everything about Alexis Claude Clairaut totally explained
Alexis Claude de Clairault (or
Clairaut) (
May 3,
1713 –
May 17,
1765) was a
French mathematician and
intellectual.
Biography
Childhood
Clairault was born in
Paris, France, where his father taught
mathematics. He was a
prodigy — at the age of twelve he wrote a memoir on four geometrical curves and under his father's tuition he made such rapid progress in the subject that in his thirteenth year he read before the
Académie française an account of the properties of four curves which he'd discovered. When only sixteen he finished a treatise on tortuous curves,
Recherches sur les courbes a double courbure, which, on its publication in 1731, procured his admission into the
French Academy of Sciences, although he was below the legal age as he was only eighteen.
Expeditions
In
1736, together with
Pierre Louis Maupertuis, he took part in the expedition to
Lapland, which was undertaken for the purpose of estimating a degree of the
meridian, and on his return he published his treatise
Théorie de la figure de la terre (1743). In this work he promulgated the theorem, known as
Clairaut's theorem, which connects the
gravity at points on the surface of a rotating
ellipsoid with the compression and the centrifugal force at the
equator.
In 1741 Clairault went on a scientific expedition to measure the length of a
meridian degree on the
Earth's surface, and on his return in 1743 he published his
Théorie de la figure de la terre. This hydrostatical approach to predicting the shape of the earth is founded on a paper by
Colin Maclaurin, which had shown that a mass of fluid set in rotation about a line through its
centre of mass would, under the mutual attraction of its particles, take the form of a
spheroid. This work of Clairault treated of
heterogeneous spheroids and contains the proof of his formula for the accelerating effect of gravity in a place of latitude. In 1849
Stokes showed that the same result was true whatever was the interior constitution or density of the Earth, provided the surface was a spheroid of equilibrium of small ellipticity.
Focus on astronomical motion
He obtained an ingenious approximate solution of the
problem of the three bodies; in
1750 he gained the prize of the
St Petersburg Academy for his essay
Théorie de la lune; and in 1759 he calculated the
perihelion of
Halley's comet.
The
Théorie de la lune is strictly Newtonian in character. This contains the explanation of the motion of the
apsis which had previously puzzled astronomers, and which Clairaut had at first deemed so inexplicable that he was on the point of publishing a new hypothesis as to the law of attraction when it occurred to him to carry the approximation to the third order, and he thereupon found that the result was in accordance with the observations. This was followed in 1754 by some lunar tables. Clairaut subsequently wrote various papers on the
orbit of the
Moon, and on the motion of
comets as affected by the perturbation of the planets, particularly on the path of
Halley's comet.
Personal life and death
His growing popularity in society hindered his scientific work: "He was focused," says
Bossut, "with dining and with evenings, coupled with a lively taste for women, and seeking to make his pleasures into his day to day work, he lost rest, health, and finally life at the age of fifty-two."
Clairaut died in Paris in 1765.
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