Louis Poinsot [SEP] occupation
Louis Poinsot
Louis Poinsot (3 January 1777 – 5 December 1859) was a French mathematician and physicist. Poinsot was the inventor of geometrical mechanics, showing how a system of forces acting on a rigid body could be resolved into a single force and a couple.
Life.
Louis was born in Paris on 3 January 1777. He attended the school of Lycée Louis-le-Grand for secondary preparatory education for entrance to the famous École Polytechnique. In October 1794, at age 17, he took the École
the period of Earth’s polhode wobble to be about 9–10 months.
During the mid 19th century, Louis Poinsot developed a geometric interpretation of the physics of rotating bodies that provided a visual counterpart to Euler’s algebraic equations. Poinsot was a contemporary of Léon Foucault, who invented the gyroscope and whose pendulum experiments provided incontrovertible evidence the Earth rotates. In the fashion of the day, Poinsot coined the terms polhode and its counterpart, herpolhode, to describe this wobble in the motion of rotating rigid bodies. Poinsot derived these terms