Michel Chasles

Mathematician, born in Epernon, NC France. He entered the Ecole Polytechnique in 1812, and became a military engineer, but resigned to devote himself to mathematics, becoming professor of geometry at the Sorbonne in 1846. He greatly developed synthetic projective geometry by means of cross-ratio and homographies without the use of co-ordinates.

Michel Chasles (15 November 1793 – 18 December 1880) was a French mathematician.

He was born at Epernon in France and studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris.

In 1837 he published his Historical view of the origin and development of methods in geometry, a study of the method of reciprocal polars in projective geometry. The work gained him considerable fame and respect and he was appointed Professor at the École Polytechnique in 1841, then he was awarded a chair at the Sorbonne in 1846.

Jakob Steiner had proposed the problem of enumerating the number of conic sections tangent to each of five given conics, and had answered it incorrectly.

In 1865 he was awarded the Copley Medal.