Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, born in 1698 at Saint-Malo to a moderately wealthy family of merchant-corsairs, was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He was admitted to the Académie des Sciences in 1723 and became its director, and at the invitation of Frederick the Great he became the first president of the Prussian Academy of Science. In 1736 he led the French geodesic mission to Lapland to measure a degree of arc of the meridian; his results settled in his favour the dispute over whether the Earth is oblate, as he predicted, or prolate, as Jacques Cassini measured. He is often credited with discovering the principle of least action, which he expressed as an integral equation for the path followed by a physical system. His work in natural history, including the anonymous book Vénus physique, touched on heredity and the struggle for life. He died in 1759.