Louis Puissant directed the École de Géographes in Paris from 1809 to 1833.
He is best remembered for his invention of a new map projection for a new map of France and he was involved in the production of the map. The map was produced with considerable detail, the projection used spherical trigonometry, truncated power series and differential geometry.
He wrote on geodesy, the shape of the Earth and spherical trigonometry.