Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

About Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Who is it?: Naturalist
Birth Day: September 07, 1707
Birth Place: Montbard, French
Died On: 16 April 1788(1788-04-16) (aged 80)\nParis, France
Birth Sign: Libra
Known for: Histoire Naturelle
Fields: Natural history
Institutions: Jardin du Roi
Influences: Nicolas Antoine Boulanger
Influenced: Nicolas Desmarest Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon Net Worth

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was born on September 07, 1707 in Montbard, French, is Naturalist. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a naturalist and French author, who will be always remembered for his extensive work on natural history. Born to a father who was a state official and a mother who had a thirst for knowledge, Georges-Louis had got his streak of intelligence from his mother. He was an average student at College of Godrans in Dijon, but had a flair for mathematics. Respecting his father’s wish he began studying law, but abandoned it to study Mathematics and Medicine at University of Angers. During this period he befriended Duke of Kingston, and travelled with him extensively in Europe. He returned to Dijon, received his inheritance, and went to Paris to pursue science. He befriended Voltaire and several other famous intellectuals during his stay in Paris. Georges-Louis introduced integral and differential calculus in probability theory. He was also absorbed to the French Academy of Sciences. His work on mechanical properties of wood was a long extensive research, and soon after he was appointed as keeper of Jardin du Roi or the Royal Botanical Garden. He was appointed to several prestigious positions like the Treasurer of Academy of Sciences. Read on to know more about his life and works.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon is a member of Scientists

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Famous Quotes:

He was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody.... he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.

Biography/Timeline

1723

Georges attended the Jesuit College of Godrans in Dijon from the age of ten onwards. From 1723–1726 he then studied law in Dijon, the prerequisite for continuing the family tradition in civil Service. In 1728 Georges left Dijon to study mathematics and Medicine at the University of Angers in France. At Angers in 1730 he made the acquaintance of the young English Duke of Kingston, who was on his grand tour of Europe, and traveled with him on a large and expensive entourage for a year and a half through southern France and parts of Italy. Georges-Louis Leclerc had an elder brother, Pierre Daubenton (1703–1776), who wrote numerous articles for the Encyclopédie by Diderot

1732

In 1732 he moved to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Voltaire and other intellectuals. He first made his mark in the field of mathematics and, in his Sur le jeu de franc-carreau, introduced differential and integral calculus into probability theory; the Problem of Buffon's needle in probability theory is named after him. In 1734 he was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences. During this period he corresponded with the Swiss Mathematician Gabriel Cramer.

1733

His protector Maurepas had asked the Academy of Sciences to do research on wood for the construction of ships in 1733. Soon afterward, Buffon began a long-term study, performing some of the most comprehensive tests to date on the mechanical properties of wood. Included were a series of tests to compare the properties of small specimens with those of large members. After carefully testing more than a thousand small specimens without knots or other defects, Buffon concluded that it was not possible to extrapolate to the properties of full-size timbers, and he began a series of tests on full-size structural members.

1739

In 1739 he was appointed head of the Parisian Jardin du Roi with the help of Maurepas; he held this position to the end of his life. Buffon was instrumental in transforming the Jardin du Roi into a major research center and museum. He also enlarged it, arranging the purchase of adjoining plots of land and acquiring new botanical and zoological specimens from all over the world.

1749

Buffon's Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1788: in 36 volumes; an additional volume based on his notes appeared in 1789) was originally intended to cover all three "kingdoms" of nature but the Histoire naturelle ended up being limited to the animal and mineral kingdoms, and the animals covered were only the birds and quadrupeds. "Written in a brilliant style, this work was read ... by every educated person in Europe". Those who assisted him in the production of this great work included Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, Philibert Guéneau de Montbeillard, and Gabriel-Léopold Bexon, along with numerous artists. Buffon's Histoire naturelle was translated into many different languages, making him one of the most widely read authors of the day, a rival to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

1752

In 1752 Buffon married Marie-Françoise de Saint-Belin-Malain, the daughter of an impoverished noble family from Burgundy, who was enrolled in the convent school run by his sister. Madame de Buffon’s second child, a son born in 1764, survived childhood; she herself died in 1769. When in 1772 Buffon became seriously ill and the promise that his son (then only 8) should succeed him as Director of the Jardin became clearly impracticable and was withdrawn, the King raised Buffon’s estates in Burgundy to the status of a county – and thus Buffon (and his son) became a Count. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1782. Buffon died in Paris in 1788.

1753

Thanks to his talent as a Writer, he was invited to join Paris's second great academy, the Académie française in 1753. In his Discours sur le style ("Discourse on Style"), pronounced before the Académie française, he said, "Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste .... The style is the man himself" ("Le style c'est l'homme même"). Unfortunately for him, Buffon's reputation as a literary Stylist also gave ammunition to his detractors: The Mathematician Jean le Rond D'Alembert, for Example, called him "the great phrase-monger".

1776

He was buried in a chapel adjacent to the church of Sainte-Urse Montbard; during the French Revolution, his tomb was broken into and the lead that covered the coffin was ransacked to produce bullets. His heart was initially saved, as it was guarded by Suzanne Necker (wife of Jacques Necker), but was later lost. Today, only Buffon's cerebellum remains, as it is kept in the base of the statue by Pajou that Louis XVI had commissioned in his honor in 1776, located at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

1778

In Les époques de la nature (1778) Buffon discussed the origins of the solar system, speculating that the planets had been created by a comet's collision with the sun. He also suggested that the earth originated much earlier than 4004 BC, the date determined by Archbishop James Ussher. Basing his figures on the cooling rate of iron tested at his Laboratory the Petit Fontenet at Montbard, he calculated that the age of the earth was 75,000 years. Once again, his ideas were condemned by the Sorbonne, and once again he issued a retraction to avoid further problems.

2018

Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century".

2019

Georges Louis Leclerc (later Comte de Buffon) was born at Montbard, in the Province of Burgundy to Benjamin Francois Leclerc, a minor local official in charge of the salt tax and Anne-Christine Marlin also from a family of civil servants. Georges was named after his mother’s uncle (his godfather) Georges Blaisot, the tax-farmer of the Duke of Savoy for all of Sicily. In 1714 Blaisot died childless, leaving a considerable fortune to his seven-year-old Godson. Benjamin Leclerc then purchased an estate containing the nearby village of Buffon and moved the family to Dijon acquiring various offices there as well as a seat in the Dijon Parlement.