At the Crossroads of Two Engineering Cultures, or an Unedited Story of the French Polytechnician Charles Potier’s Descriptive Geometry Books in Russia

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the ideas of Gaspard Monge’s descriptive geometry spread to Russia. As in other countries, the transfer of knowledge in this field was connected to the French École polytechnique. Its disseminators were both the first Russian students at the polytechnique and its French graduates, who were invited to Russia by Alexandre I in 1810. Two of the latter, Alexandre Fabre and Charles Michel Potier , initiated the teaching of descriptive geometry according to Monge’s principles at the newly created Institute of the Corps of Engineers of Ways of Communication (1810–1811). Appointed professor of descriptive geometry (1815–1818), Potier completed and published, for the first time in Russia, a series of original works on descriptive geometry and its applications, which became essential for the teaching, the dispersion and the spreading development of this science in Russia for the decades to come. However, according to standard Russian historiography, it was not Potier but his Russian translator, former student and disciple Jakov Sevastianov , who was seen as the founding father of descriptive geometry in Russia. Our paper examines the career in Russia and the mathematical works of this French engineer who, despite his pioneering books preserved in major Russian and French libraries, including that of the École polytechnique, remains, paradoxically, an “illustrious unknown” in both countries.