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Adrien-marie Legendre




Most of his work was brought to perfection by others: his work on roots of Polynomials inspired Galois Theory ; Abel 's work on Elliptic Functions was built on Legendre's; some of Gauss ' work in statistics and number theory completed that of Legendre.

In 1830 he gave a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem for exponent ''n'' = 5, which was given almost simultaneously by Dirichlet in 1828 .

In number theory, he conjectured the quadratic reciprocity law, subsequently proved by Gauss. He also did pioneering work on the distribution of Primes , and on the application of analysis to number theory. His 1796 conjecture of the Prime Number Theorem was rigorously proved by Hadamard and De La Vallée-Poussin in 1898 .

Legendre did an impressive amount of work on Elliptic Function s, including the classification of Elliptic Integrals , but it took Abel's stroke of genius to study the inverses of Jacobi 's functions and solve the problem completely.

He is known for the Legendre Transform , which is used to go from the Lagrangian to the Hamiltonian formulation of Classical Mechanics . In Thermodynamics it is also used to obtain the Enthalpy and the Helmholtz and Gibbs Free Energies from the Internal Energy .


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