French Academy of Sciences

His weekly seminar, though, proved to be more popular.

He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1933 and became its permanent secretary at 50, serving until he was 83.

He also wrote many popular books on physics, which earned him UNESCO's first Kalinga Prize for Popularizing Physics in 1952.

When his brother Maurice died in 1960, Louis became the seventh Duc de Broglie.

And so his work on voting grew out of a genuine belief that mathematics and reason could help make democracy work.

He served as secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

And so in addition to the general belief in democracy, he had the practical matter of electing members to the academy.

And how do you do that? And what's the most fair way to take individual judgments and preferences and combine them into a collective decision? So there's also a practical side to this as well that was close to home for him.

Her femur had been torn from its socket, and the flesh of her hip and thigh torn off.

The account was recorded in the French Academy of Sciences by Dr M Moran.

He wrote that there was no blood at the scene, nor any sign of her missing flesh.

This is the paradox that Condorcet, a passionate believer in democracy, encountered in the late 18th century.

As the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, he'd been looking for ways to make sure the group was choosing new members fairly.

More enlightened than most, Condorcet would also question the democratic arithmetic of excluding half the population, explicitly defending women's political rights in a 1790 essay.

A few years later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution he had supported put him in a prison cell.

Finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and almost simultaneously, two scientists, a Russian and a Bulgarian, Lobachevsky and Boyui, showed irrefutably that this proof is impossible.

They have nearly rid us of inventors of geometries without a postulate, and ever since the Académie des Sciences receives only about one or two new demonstrations a year.

But the question was not exhausted, and it was not long before a great step was taken by the celebrated memoir of Riemann entitled Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zum Grunde liegen.

This little work has inspired most of the recent treatises to which I shall later on refer, and among which I may mention those of Beltrami and Helmholtz.

I am now going to pass and review these different categories of problems by discussing in succession what I have called subjective and objective probability.

2.

Probability in mathematics The impossibility of squaring the circle was shown in 1885, but before that date all geometers considered this impossibility as so probable that the Académie des Sciences rejected without examination the alas too numerous memoirs on this subject that a few unhappy madmen sent in every year.

Was the Académie wrong? Evidently not, and it knew perfectly well that by acting in this manner it did not run the least risk of stifling a discovery of moment.

He engaged directly with Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Diderot, but almost exclusively through conflict rather than friendship.

His lifelong ambition was to be elected to the Académie Royale des Sciences.

He was never elected, which was a source of genuine and lasting disappointment.

The irony is exquisite.

The idea of conquering nature through observation and experiment had a kind of cultural energy in Paris that is hard to overstate.

The French Academy of Sciences got involved.

They commissioned another team to replicate the Montgolfiers' experiment.

This competing group, led by a physicist named Jacques Charles, worked with hydrogen gas instead of hot air.

Now he was watching a man rise into the sky above Paris.

He knew the rules had just changed, even if nobody had written the new rules yet.

The French Academy of Sciences immediately set about understanding the implications.

Military applications were obvious.

As soon as the Alecton reached Tenerife, Bouyer filed a report with the Minister of Marine, and the French consul on the island, Saban Berthelot, wrote up his own account and sent it to Paris.

By the end of December, both reports were being read at the French Academy of Sciences, and the story of the Alecton and the giant squid spread like wildfire.

Bouyer's account would soon find its way into the scientific literature of the day, appearing in academic journals and becoming a subject of discussion and, in some cases, heated debate within some of Europe's most prestigious scientific institutions.

The captain certainly had his doubters.