LAGRANGE, JOSEPH LOUIS

COMTE (1736-1813), famous mathematician; 6. at Turin, but of Fr. extraction (grandson of Des cartes); prof. of Geometry at Turin Royal Artillery School at age of eighteen; app. by Frederick the Great to succeed Euler as director of Berlin Academy, 1759; went to Paris, 1787, and stayed there throughout Revolution, though in danger; loaded with honors by Napoleon; buried ir Panthéon. His work on the Nature and Propagation of Sound, and invention of the Calculus of Variations, when only twenty-four, proved his wonderful abilities of analysis, and placed him at a very early age in the front rank of mathematicians. On five occasions he was awarded the prize of the Paris Academy for treatises on astronomical problems, r