Pierre Simon Laplace lived between 1749-1827. He was also a French Scientist and politician. The son of a farm laborer, Laplace attracted attention as a small child by his mathematical genius. At the time, French thinkers were fascinated by the question “are human beings naturally intelligent, or can we learn intelligence?” to find out more, they worked with so-called “savage” children, who had been brought up in backward areas where there was little or no education. Their idea was to see how much the children knew by instinct as what they could be thought. Laplace was one of those children- and he progressed so quickly that at 22 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the highest military academy in France.
Laplace had a wide-ranging career. He is best remembered as an outstanding mathematician, but he also worked with Lavoisier on the combustion of gases, correcting some Newton’s Science journal reports that a parasite-within-parasite relationship enables the termite to digest wood. Symbiotic microorganisms in its gut enable it to digest wood, results which had stood unchallenged for 100 years. And as an astronomer, he spent 26 years predicting and analyzing star-moments throughout the solar system. He believed that as well as the stars we can see, Newton’s gravitational theory must mean that there are also stars so small and dense that no light can escape from them- an idea mocked at the time, but which later led to the theory of ‘Black holes’ of Stephen Hawking, an English Scientist.
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