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Jean Le Rond d'Alembert ( November 16, 1717 - October 29, 1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher. He was also one of the editors of the Encyclopédie, an early French encyclopedia. D'Alembert's method for the wave equation is named after him.
Born in Paris, d'Alembert was the illegitimate child of the writer Claudine Guérin de Tencin and the chevalier Louis-Camus Destouches (an artillery officer). Destouches was abroad at the time of d'Alembert's birth, and a couple of days after birth his mother left him on the steps of the Saint-Jean-le-Rond de Paris church. According to custom he is named after the protecting saint of the church. d'Alembert was placed in an orphanage but was soon adopted by the wife of a glazier. Destouches secretly paid for the education of Jean le Rond, but didn't want his parentage officially recognised.
D'Alembert first attended a private school. The chevalier Destouches left d'Alembert an annuityThe term annuity in current use in the insurance industry, refers to two very different types of legal contracts with very different purposes. Traditionally, for at least four hundred years, the term annuity refered to what is more correctly called today of 1200 livres on his death in 1726. Under the influence of the Destouches family, at the age of twelve d'Alembert entered the Quatre-Nations jansenistJansenism was a branch of Christian philosophy founded by Cornelius Jansen ( 1585- 1638), a Flemish theologian. It was a movement of the reading public, the bourgeoisie and aristocrats, rather than a groundswell of instinctive belief. An opponent of the J college (the institution was also known under the name Mazarin). Here he studied philosophyPhilosophy literally means 'love of wisdom' from the Greek 'philo' and 'sofia'. It is now widely used to designate the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters concerning life, death, meaning, reality, being and truth. The term may also re, lawThis article is about law in society. For other possible meanings, see law (disambiguation). Law (a loanword from Danish-Norwegian lov , in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules of conduct which mandate or proscribe (or both) specified relationshi, and artMona Lisa Although today the word art usually refers to the visual arts, the concept of what art is has continuously changed over centuries. Perhaps the most concise definition is its broadest—art refers to all creative human endeavors, excluding actions, graduating as bachelier in 1735Events 16 April The London premiere of Alcina by George Frideric Handel, his first the first Italian opera for the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. August 4 Freedom of the press: New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditiou. In his later life d'Alembert scorned the Cartesian principles he had been taught by the Jansenists: "physical premotion, innate ideas and the vortices".
The Jansenists steered d'Alembert toward an ecclesiastical career, attempting to deter him from pursuits such as poetry and mathematics. Theology was, however, "rather unsubstantial fodder" for d'Alembert. He entered law school for two years, and was nominated avocat in 1738.
He was also interested in medicine and mathematics. Jean le Rond was first registered under the name Daremberg, but later changed it to d'Alembert. In July of 1739 he made his first contribution to the field of mathematics, pointing out the errors he had detected in L'analyse démontrée (published 1708 by Charles René Reynaud ) in a communication addressed to the Académie des Sciences. At the time L'analyse démontrée was a standard work, which d'Alembert himself had used to study the foundations of mathematics.
In 1740 he submited his second scientific work from the field of fluid mechanics Memoire sur le refraction des corps solides, which was recognized by Clairaut. In this work d'Alembert theoretically explained refraction. He also wrote about what is now called D'Alembert's paradox: that the force on a body immersed in an inviscid fluid is identically zero.
While he made great strides in mathematics and physics, d'Alembert is also famously known for incorrectly arguing in Croix ou Pile that the probability of a coin landing heads increased for every time that it came up tails. In gambling, the strategy of decreasing one's bet the more one wins and increasing one's bet the more one loses is therefore called the d'Alembert system, a type of Martingale.
D'Alembert died in Paris.
In France, the fundamental theorem of algebra is known as the d'Alembert/ Gauss theorem.
See also D'Alembert's principle.