Girard Desargues

Girard Desargues, who lived from 21 February 1591 to September 1661, was a French mathematician and engineer who is considered one of the founders of projective geometry. He was born in Lyon into a family devoted to service to the French crown, and his father was a royal notary. He worked as a tutor, may have served as an engineer and technical consultant in the entourage of Richelieu, and from 1645 worked as an architect who planned several private and public buildings in Paris and Lyon. As an engineer he designed a system for raising water, based on an epicycloidal wheel, that he installed near Paris. His 1639 Rough draft for an essay on the results of taking plane sections of a cone is his best known work, and his work was rediscovered and republished in 1864. Desargues theorem, the Desargues graph and a lunar crater carry his name.