Simeon Poisson

Simeon Poisson was born in 1781, his father worked in the army and he teached to Poisson to write and read. Poisson was a french physicist and mathematician, he worked on probability theory, Diferential Geometry, and electricity. In 1812 he tried to calculate mathematicly the distribution of the electric charges in the surface of a conductor, then he showed that this theory could be applied to the magnetic fields. When he was only 18 years old he wrote works about finite diferences, but his most famous work is about the definite integrals.

Poisson worked in the Polytechnic School from 1802 until 1808. Poisson was particularly interested on the moon movements. In 1832 was written a work about probabilities by Poisson where he describes the probability as a fact that occurs in a space or time interval under the condition that the interval is quite little but there are many intervals. During all his life were published around 300 and 400 works by Poisson, and a lot of them were about electricity, magnetism and astronomy. Lagrange and Laplace, two great mathematicians, were his teachers.

A lot of important definitions and formulas contain his name, like the Poisson equation, a partial second order diferential equation used in electricity, or the Poisson coeficient, that is used in engineering. His works about statistics and probability theory were continued by Riemann and Dirichlet

Poisson's distribution