Gaspard de Prony
French mathematician and engineer, who worked on hydraulics (1755-1839)
Baron Gaspard Clair François Marie Riche de Prony (22 July 1755 – 29 July 1839) was a French mathematician and engineer, who worked on hydraulics. He was born at Chamelet, Beaujolais, France and died in Asnières-sur-Seine, France.
Education and early works
He was Engineer-in-Chief of the École nationale des ponts et chaussées [National school of bridges and roads], a technical school in Paris.
The trigonometric and logarithmic tables of the cadastre
In 1791, Prony embarked on the task of producing logarithmic and trigonometric tables for the French Cadastre (geographic survey). The effort was sanctioned by the French National Assembly, which, after the French Revolution wanted to bring uniformity to the multiple measurements and standards used throughout the nation. In particular, his tables were intended for precise land surveys, as part of a greater cadastre effort. The tables were vast, calculating logarithms from 1 to 200,000, with values calculated to between fourteen and twenty-nine decimal places, (which Prony recognized was excessively precise).
Inspired by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Prony divided up the labor into three levels, bragging that he "could manufacture logarithms as easily as one manufactures pins."
The first level consisted of five or six high-ranking mathematicians with sophisticated analytical skills, including Adrien-Marie Legendre and Lazare Carnot. This group chose the analytical formulas most suited to evaluation by numerical methods, and specified the number of decimals and the numerical range the tables were to cover. Specifically, they selected the mathematical expressions for computation and verification, and determined the starting values for numbers or angles, as well as the number of significant figures used in each table.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q451608. VIAF identifies the subject as 49335766. The Library of Congress control number is n86853064. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1755, 1839 and 1791.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gaspard de Prony” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.