Lazare Carnot

Lazare Carnot, born in 1753 in the Burgundy village of Nolay and dying in exile in Magdeburg in 1823, was a French mathematician, physicist and military officer who also became a leading politician of the French Revolution. Trained at the royal engineering school at Mézières, he published an Essay on Machines in 1784 and later wrote the 1803 Géométrie de position, regarded as a pioneering work in projective geometry. He sat on the Committee of Public Safety, where his reorganization of the army and his introduction of mass conscription earned him the title Organizer of Victory, served in the Directory, and briefly held ministerial posts under Napoleon. He also gave his name to the Carnot wall, a system of fortification widely used in continental Europe in the nineteenth century.