Baron Siméon Denis Poisson FRS FRSE was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist, who made several scientific advances.
Within the elite Académie des Sciences he was a leading opponent of the wave theory of light, eventually being proven wrong by Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
“The only two good things in life are doing mathematics and teaching it.”
La vie n'est bonne qu'à deux choses : à faire des mathématiques et à les professer.
quoted by François Arago in Notices biographiques, Volume 2 http://books.google.fr/books?pg=PA662&id=ZzNLAAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false, 1854, p. 662.
Statement of Poisson's law also known as the Law of Large Numbers (1837), as quoted by [Richard Von Mises, Probability, Statistics and Truth, Allen and Unwin, 1957, 104-105]
“That which can affect our senses in any manner whatever, is termed matter.”
Introductory sentence of [Siméon-Denis Poisson, translated by Henry Hickman Harte, A Treatise of Mechanics, Longman and co, 1842, 1]
