Auguste Bravais

Auguste Bravais (1811 to 1863) was a French physicist, born in Annonay, best known for his work in crystallography and for the Bravais lattices. He studied at the College Stanislas in Paris and joined the Ecole Polytechnique in 1829, where he beat his classmate Evariste Galois in a mathematics competition. He then served as a naval officer, did hydrographic work on the Algerian coast and took part in the Recherche expedition to Spitzbergen and Lapland, and from 1840 he taught applied mathematics for astronomy at the Faculty of Sciences in Lyon. In 1848 he showed that there are 14 distinct lattices in three-dimensional crystals, correcting an earlier scheme of 15, and in 1844 he reached a definition of the product-moment correlation coefficient before Karl Pearson. He held the chair of physics at the Ecole Polytechnique from 1845 to 1856, co-founded the Societe meteorologique de France, joined the French Academy of Sciences in 1854 and studied the conical pendulum and the effect of the Earth's rotation on it.