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Many of them held chairs or other posts in institutions of higher education or administration. Some went back to the Ecole Polytechnique. For example, as a founding professor of mechanics and analysis, Gaspard Riche de Prony had Augustin Louis Cauchy as a student in the mid-1800s, and a decade later, graduation examiner de Prony worked with Cauchy as a professor there.
One of the most charismatic of the graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique is the subject of this book. Charles Dupin (1784–1873) was a talented mathematician with a special interest in geometry. He followed Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), an important figure in the founding of the Ecole Polytechnique. When Monge was disgraced at the Restoration in 1815 as a close follower of Napoleon and died three years later, Dupin quickly wrote his biography.
Graduating from the school in 1803, Dupin did not proceed to a specialist school but pursued his interest in marine engineering and then technology in general. He took initiatives not only in France but also in Greece and especially in Great Britain, where he conducted a remarkably comprehensive study of the country’s engineering facilities in the late 1810s that was published in six quarto volumes. But, his main professional commitment was to serve as a professor of geometry and mechanics in the Conservatoire des arts et métiers from 1819 until his death. In particular, until around 1840 in his opening lecture of the course he would discuss some current theme in French education or science in a public address that aroused much interest and often gained considerable reprints.
Dupin took the public stage still further by his election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1827 and his appointment to the Senate in 1852; he even served for a brief time in 1834 as the minister of the marine. He lived a life that was exceptional not only in its length but also in its involvement in public and even political affairs as well as in scientific research. Interest in him has increased in recent years to the extent that a special meeting on his work was held in Paris in 2007. In this first substantial biography of Dupin, Margaret Bradley, already a biographer