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Girard Desargues was a French mathematician and engineer, who is considered one of the founders of projective geometry. Desargues' theorem, the Desargues graph, and the crater Desargues on the Moon are named in his honour.



Born in Lyon, Desargues came from a family devoted to service to the French crown. His father was a royal notary, an investigating commissioner of the Seneschal's court in Lyon , the collector of the tithes on ecclesiastical revenues for the city of Lyon and for the diocese of Lyon.

Girard Desargues worked as an architect from 1645. Prior to that, he had worked as a tutor and may have served as an engineer and technical consultant in the entourage of Richelieu.

As an architect, Desargues planned several private and public buildings in Paris and Lyon. As an engineer, he designed a system for raising water that he installed near Paris. It was based on the use of the at the time unrecognized principle of the epicycloidal wheel.

His research on perspective and geometrical projections can be seen as a culmination of centuries of scientific inquiry across the classical epoch in optics that stretched from al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham to Johannes Kepler, and going beyond a mere synthesis of these traditions with Renaissance perspective theories and practices.His work was rediscovered and republished in 1864. A collection of his works was published in 1951, and the 1864 compilation remains in print. One notable work, often cited by others in mathematics, is "Rough draft for an essay on the results of taking plane sections of a cone" .

Late in his life, Desargues published a paper with the cryptic title of DALG. The most common theory about what this stands for is Des Argues, Lyonnais, Géometre .

He died in Lyon. Wikipedia  

✵ 2. March 1591 – 9. October 1661
Girard Desargues photo
Girard Desargues: 4   quotes 1   like

Famous Girard Desargues Quotes

“Parallel lines have a common end point at an infinite distance.”

Girard Desargues

Brouillion project (1639) as quoted by Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, Projective Geometry (1987)

“I freely confess that I never had taste for study or research either in physics or geometry except in so far as they could serve as a means of arriving at some sort of knowledge of the proximate causes… for the good and convenience of life, in maintaining health, in the practice of some art,… having observed that a good part of the arts is based on geometry, among others that cutting of stone in architecture, that of sundials, that of perspective in particular.”

Girard Desargues

ca. 1640) as quoted by William Thompson Sedgwick, Harry Walter Tyler, A Short History of Science https://books.google.com/books?id=Wl8AAAAAMAAJ (1917

“When no point of a line is at a finite distance, the line itself is at an infinite distance.”

Girard Desargues

Brouillion project (1639) as quoted by Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, Projective Geometry (1987)

“He who shall wish to disentangle this proposition will easily be able to compose a volume.”

Girard Desargues

ca. 1640) as quoted by William Thompson Sedgwick, Harry Walter Tyler, A Short History of Science https://books.google.com/books?id=Wl8AAAAAMAAJ (1917

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