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Pierre Simon Laplace was born at Beaumont-en-Auge in Normandy on March 23, 1749, and died at Paris on March 5, 1827. He was the son of a small cottager or perhaps a farm-labourer, and owed his education to the interest excited in some wealthy neighbours by his abilities and engaging presence. Very little is known of his early years, for when he became distinguished he had the pettiness to hold himself aloof both from his relatives and from those who had assisted him. It would seem from a pupil he became an usher in the school at Beaumont; but, having procured a letter of introduction to D'Alembert, he went to Paris to push his fortune. A paper on the principles of mechanics excited D'Alembert's interest, and on his recommendation a place in the military school was offered to Laplace.
Secure of a competency, Laplace now threw himself into original research, and in the next seventeen years, 1771-1787, he produced much of his original work in astronomy. This commenced with a memoir, read before the French Academy in 1773, in which he shewed that the planetary motions were stable, and carried the proof as far as the cubes of the eccentricities and inclinations. This was followed by several papers on points in the integral calculus, finite differences, differential equations, and astronomy.
During the years 1784-1787 he produced some memoirs of exceptional power. Prominent among these is one read in 1784, and reprinted in the third volume of the Méchanique céleste, in which he completely determined the attraction of a spheroid on a particle outside it. This is memorable for the introduction into analysis of spherical harmonics or Laplace's coefficients, as also for the development of the use of the potential - a name first given by Green in 1828.
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