Quotes from book
Mécanique analytique

Name: Mécanique analytique
Author: Joseph Louis Lagrange

Joseph Louis Lagrange

Mécanique analytique is a two volume French treatise on analytical mechanics, written by Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and published 101 years following Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It consolidated into one unified and harmonious system, the scattered developments of contributors such as Alexis Clairaut, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Leonhard Euler, and Johann and Jacob Bernoulli in the historical transition from geometrical methods, as presented in Newton's Principia, to the methods of mathematical analysis. The treatise expounds a great labor-saving and thought-saving general analytical method by which every mechanical question may be stated in a single differential equation.

“We have already various treatises on Mechanics, but the plan of this one is entirely new. I intend to reduce the theory of this Science, and the art of solving problems relating to it, to general formulae, the simple development of which provides all the equations necessary for the solution of each problem. I hope that the manner in which I have tried to attain this object will leave nothing to be desired. No diagrams will be found in this work. The methods that I explain require neither geometrical, nor mechanical, constructions or reasoning, but only algebraical operations in accordance with regular and uniform procedure. Those who love Analysis will see with pleasure that Mechanics has become a branch of it, and will be grateful to me for having thus extended its domain.”

Joseph Louis Lagrange book Mécanique analytique

Mécanique analytique (1788) as quoted by E. W. Hobson, Mathematics, from the points of view of the Mathematician and of the Physicist (1912) an address delivered to the Mathematical and Physical Society of University College London, p.13. https://books.google.com/books?id=H7Y_AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA13