Jean-Marie Duhamel

Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel
Born	(1797-02-05)5 February 1797 Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine, France
Died	29 April 1872(1872-04-29) (aged 75) Paris, France
Known for	Duhamel's formula Duhamel's integral Duhamel's principle Vibroscope
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics Physics

Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel (/ˌdjuːəˈmɛl/;[1] French: [dy.amɛl]; 5 February 1797 – 29 April 1872) was a French mathematician and physicist.

His studies were affected by the troubles of the Napoleonic era. He went on to form his own school École Sainte-Barbe. Duhamel's principle, a method of obtaining solutions to inhomogeneous linear evolution equations, is named after him. He was primarily a mathematician but did studies on the mathematics of heat, mechanics, and acoustics.[2] He also did work in calculus using infinitesimals. Duhamel's theorem for infinitesimals says that the sum of a series of infinitesimals is unchanged by replacing the infinitesimal with its principal part.[3]

In 1853 he published about an early recording device he called a vibroscope. Like other similar devices, the vibroscope was a type of measuring device similar to an oscilloscope, and could not play back the etchings it recorded.[4]

Honours

• 19617 Duhamel, asteroid named after him

See also

• Duhamel two-point function
• Raabe–Duhamel's test

References

1. "Duhamel". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
2. John J O'Connor and Edmund F Robertson. The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
3. H. J. Ettlinger (1922) "A Simple Form of Duhamel's Theorem and Some New Applications", American Mathematical Monthly 29(7): 239–50
4. Burgess, Richard James (2014). The History of Music Production. Oxford University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0199357178. Retrieved 1 August 2019.