AUGUSTIN-LOUIS CAUCHY

(August 21, 1789 – May 23, 1857)

Augustin-Louis Cauchy is the crème-de-la-crème of French mathematicians. His father
(Louis-François Cauchy) was also a top genius; who like his son, won France’s Concours
Général competition. Augustin-Louis excelled in everything he studied. The-then
leading mathematicians, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Pierre-Simon Laplace, were
amazed by his talents. He would later grow up to become the greatest French
mathematician. Despite his civil engineering chores, Cauchy always found time for his
math-leisure. He pioneered Continuum Mechanics, Complex Analysis, Permutation
Group, and Elasticity Theory: in addition to advancing numerous works of his
predecessors. He was proficient in every branch of maths, contributed significantly to
all areas, and published frequently. Several of his contributions which were
indispensable to physics found applications in engineering. Cauchy’s abilities together
with his output rate awed his contemporaries. These ensured that for several years, he
remained more famous than Carl Friedrich Gauss (the seemingly invincible Prince of
Mathematics). Revered for his intellect and deemed immortal through his masterful
works, Cauchy became the icon of rigorous proofs. He was the first to prove many
theorems: including the 175-year-old complex and difficult Fermat’s Polygonal Number
Theorem. Throughout history, only Leonhard Euler outputted more individual
disquisitions than him. His entire 800 publications were adjudged first-rate. Even after
depicting him as irredeemably mad, Niels Henrik Abel praised him as the only person
who knew how mathematics should be done. Judith Grabiner panegyrized him for
institutionalizing rigorous mathematics; whereas Hans Freudenthal reminded that
more mathematical concepts and theorems are named after Cauchy than anybody
else.