Lagny

Thomas Fantet de Lagny

Born: 7 Nov 1660 in Lyon, France
Died: 11 April 1734 in Paris, France

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De Lagny collaborated with de l'Hôpital and became professor of hydrography at Rochefort. He calculated pi to 120 places, making useful comments on the convergence of the series he was using.

He constructed trigonometric tables and used binary arithmetic. In 1733 de Lagny examined the continued fraction expansion of the quotient of two integers and, as an example, considered adjacent Fibonacci numbers as the worst case expansion for the Euclidean algorithm.

References elsewhere in this archive:

Tell me about Fibonacci numbers and de Lagny's contribution

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. B de Fontenelle, Éloge de M de Lagny, Histoire et Mémoires de l'Académie ... pour 1734 (Amsterdam, 1738), 146-155.
  3. J Shallit, Analysis of the Euclidean Algorithm, Historia Mathematica 21 (1994), 401-419. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996