Alexis Clairault

Alexis Clairaut of (or Clairaut) (May 3, 1713 to May 17, 1765) was a leading French mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist and intellectual. Clairault was born in Paris, France, where his father taught mathematics. He was a prodigy - at age twelve, he wrote a dissertation on four geometrical curves and under the tutelage of his father, he made rapid progress in the topic in his thirteenth year he read before the French Academy to the properties of the four curves he had discovered. When only sixteen he completed a treatise on the sinuous curves, Researches on Curves a double curvature, which at its publication in 1731, was granted admission to the French Academy of Sciences, although it has been attained legal age as he was only eighteen. In 1736, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, he took part in the expedition to Lapland, which was undertaken for the purpose of estimating a degree of meridian.After his return he published his treatise Theory of the figure of the Earth (1743). In this work, it enacted the theorem, known as Clairaut's theorem, which connects the gravity points on the surface of an ellipsoid of rotation with compression