Jean-Étienne Montucla

Jean-Étienne Montucla was a French mathematician and historian, born at Lyon in 1725 and dying in 1799. In 1754 he published an anonymous treatise on quadrature, the Histoire des recherches sur la quadrature du cercle, and from 1758 he issued the first part of his Histoire des Mathématiques, a history of the mathematical sciences that George Sarton said might almost be called a history of science from the mathematical angle. He was appointed intendant-secretary of Grenoble in 1758, secretary to the expedition for colonizing Cayenne in 1764, and chief architect and censor-royal for mathematical books in 1765, and in 1778 he re-edited Jacques Ozanam's Recreations mathématiques. The French Revolution left him in great destitution, and after his death Jérôme Lalande completed the Histoire in four volumes published from 1799 to 1802.