Adrien Marie Legendre, a French mathematician, born in Toulouse in 1752, died near Paris, Jan. 10, 1833. He evinced an early taste for mathematics, and through the influence of D'Alembert was appointed in 1774 to a chair in the military school at Paris. In 1782 he gained prizes for two remarkable papers from the academies of science at Paris and Berlin. In 1783 he succeeded D'Alembert at the French academy, and in 1787 was appointed by the government, with Cassini and Mechain, to connect the observatories of Greenwich and Paris by a series of triangles. He presented in 1791 a report of their joint labors, with a description of a new instrument which he had invented and successfully used for measuring angles. In 1794 he published his Elements de geometrie, upon which his reputation principally rests. . It has been several times printed in English, the best translation being that of Sir David Brewster. The same year he published a Me-moire sur les transeendantes elliptiques. In 1798 appeared his Essai sur les nombres, reprinted with additions in 1830, under the title of Theorie des nombres (2 vols. 8vo), and in 1805 a Nouvelle methode your determiner l'orbite des cometes.

These were followed by his Exerciccs de calcul integral sur divers ordres de transcendantes et sur les quadratures (3 vols. 4to, 1807-19), in which he attempted to collect all that is most remarkable in the theory of transcendentals and integrals. This subject was enlarged and reduced to a more digested system in his Traite des fonctions elliptiques et des integrales euleriennes, avec des tables pour en faciliter le calcul numerique (3 vols. 4to, 1827-'32). He was appointed in 1808 councillor of the university, and in 1816 examiner of candidates for the polytechnic school.