Edmond Nicolas Laguerre

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Born: 9 April 1834 in Bar-le-Duc, France
Died: 14 Aug 1886 in Bar-le-Duc, France

Edmond Laguerre attended the École Polytechnique in Paris but only ranked 46th in his class. He was an artillery officer from 1854 to 1864 when he returned to the École Polytechnique where he remained for the rest of his life.

His most important work was in the areas of analysis and geometry. His work in geometry was important at the time but has been overtaken by Lie group theory, Cayley's work and Klein's work.

Laguerre studied approximation methods and is best remembered for the special functions the Laguerre polynomials which are solutions of the Laguerre differential equations.