Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was a French naturalist, mathematician and cosmologist, born at Montbard in Burgundy on 7 September 1707. After studying law, mathematics and medicine he settled in Paris in 1732 and first made his name in mathematics, bringing calculus into probability theory in a study that gave rise to Buffon's needle. Admitted to the French Academy of Sciences in 1734, he was appointed head of the Jardin du Roi in 1739 and held the post for life, turning it into a major research centre and museum. His Histoire Naturelle, published in thirty-six quarto volumes in his lifetime, shaped a generation of naturalists including Lamarck and Cuvier. He was an early observer of ecological succession and was made to retract his views on the age of the Earth and on animal evolution. He died in Paris in 1788.