Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis

Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis was a French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist, born in Paris on 21 May 1792. In 1808 he placed second among all the students entering that year, and in 1816 he became a tutor at the École Polytechnique, where he carried out experiments on friction and hydraulics. In 1829 he published the textbook Calcul de l'Effet des Machines, which presented mechanics in a way that industry could readily apply, and in the same year he became professor of mechanics at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. He was the first to apply the term travail, translated as work, to the transfer of energy by a force acting through a distance, and he established the correct expression for kinetic energy as one half of mass times velocity squared. He is best known for his work on the supplementary forces detected in a rotating frame of reference, which leads to the Coriolis effect.