Lazare Carnot
French mathematician, engineer, and revolutionary statesman — the 'Organiser of Victory' and father of Sadi Carnot.
Biography
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was born in Nolay, Burgundy, in 1753 and trained as a military engineer. A man of formidable range, he combined a career in mathematics and mechanics with a leading role in the politics of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.
As a member of the Committee of Public Safety from 1793, he organised and supplied the armies of the young Republic with such success that he was hailed as the 'Organiser of Victory' (l'Organisateur de la Victoire). He later served Napoleon as Minister of War and Minister of the Interior, but his unbending republican principles repeatedly put him at odds with those in power; after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 he was exiled, and he died in Magdeburg in 1823.
His scientific work centred on the foundations of mechanics and on geometry. In Essai sur les machines en général (1783) he analysed the efficiency of machines and the losses caused by sudden impacts and abrupt changes of motion — an early concern with wasted work that would echo, transformed, in his son's thermodynamics. He also made lasting contributions to projective geometry.
His scientific cast of mind shaped his household. His son Sadi Carnot, raised amid these ideas about machines and motive power, would carry the family's preoccupation with the efficiency of engines to its profoundest conclusion.
Contributions
- 01Analysed the general efficiency of machines and the dissipation of work in his Essai sur les machines en général (1783).
- 02Made foundational contributions to projective and synthetic geometry.
- 03Shaped, through his engineering outlook, the intellectual formation of his son Sadi Carnot, founder of thermodynamics.