Publisher's Synopsis
Following the French Revolution, the physicist and mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) taught at the École Normale Supérieure and later succeeded Lagrange at the École Polytechnique. He was promoted to administrative positions under Napoleon, but continued to pursue his scientific interests. From 1822 until his death he served as the permanent secretary for mathematical sciences at the Académie des Sciences. These selected works were edited by the mathematician Jean Gaston Darboux (1842-1917) and published in two volumes between 1888 and 1890. Volume 1 is given over entirely to the immortal Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822), from which the world learnt about the heat equation and the series which bears Fourier's name. Volume 2 includes the first paper to propose the greenhouse effect, the first paper to address the cooling of the earth's interior, work on optimisation under linear constraints, and results on roots of polynomials.
