François Arago

François Arago, in full Dominique François Jean Arago, was a French mathematician, physicist, astronomer, freemason, supporter of the Carbonari revolutionaries and politician, born in 1786 and dying in 1853. He was sent to the municipal college of Perpignan to prepare for the entrance examination of the École Polytechnique, which he entered towards the close of 1803. In 1804, on the recommendation of Siméon Poisson, he received the appointment of secretary to the Paris Observatory. He deposited the records of his survey in the Bureau des Longitudes, was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences at the unusually early age of twenty-three, and before the close of 1809 was chosen to succeed Gaspard Monge in the chair of analytical geometry at the École Polytechnique.