Sylvestre François Lacroix
French mathematician (1765-1843)
Sylvestre François Lacroix (28 April 1765 – 24 May 1843) was a French mathematician.
Life
He was born in Paris, and was raised in a poor family who still managed to obtain a good education for their son. Lacroix's path to mathematics started with the novel Robinson Crusoe. That gave him an interest in sailing and thus navigation too. At that point geometry captured his interest and the rest of mathematics followed. He had courses with Antoine-René Mauduit at College Royale de France and Joseph-Francois Marie at Collége Mazaine of University of Paris. In 1779 he obtained some lunar observations of Pierre Charles Le Monnier and began to calculate the variables of lunar theory. The next year he followed some lectures of Gaspard Monge.
In 1782 at the age of 17 he became an instructor in mathematics at the École de Gardes de la Marine in Rochefort. Monge was the students' examiner and Lacroix's supervisor there until 1795.
The public source identifies “Sylvestre François Lacroix” as french mathematician (1765-1843). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sylvestre, François and Lacroix.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q983382. VIAF identifies the subject as 66568752. The Library of Congress control number is n84805294. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1765, 1843, 1779 and 1782.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sylvestre François Lacroix” 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.