Abstract
On March 5, 1827 at nine o’clock in the morning the Marquis Laplace died, a peer of France, one of the first chevaliers of the Legion of Honor and worthy of its highest decoration, the Grand Cross. “What we know is nothing in comparison with what we do not know” were his last words. Laplace was called “the French Newton” and he died exactly one hundred years after Newton, who had been his idol.
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References
Joseph Fourier, “Éloge historique de Laplace,” Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1831.
Jacques Cousin (1739–1800).
Jean-Noöl Hallé (1754–1822).
François Arago, Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men, translated by W. H. Smyth et al., Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, London, 1857, p. 201.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, translated by Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory, Wiley, New York, 1902, p. 4.
Ibid., p. 108.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., p. 109. Here “probability of proofs” means the probability that the testimony of witnesses is correct.—Transl.
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© 2007 Second English edition Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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(2007). Pierre-Simon Laplace. In: Tales of Mathematicians and Physicists. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-48811-0_9
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