Biography

 

After leaving Ecole des Ponts, Maurice d’Ocagne was assigned to the Navy hydraulics department at Rochefort and Cherbourg, and in 1891 became deputy director of the French General Ordnance.Appointed successively from 1893 as professor of astronomy and geodesics at the École polytechnique, tutor in mechanics at Polytechnique and professor of descriptive geometry at the Ponts in 1894, and finally professor of geometry at Polytechnique from 1912 to 1936, he also held the title of Inspector General of Ecole des Ponts and in 1901 of its Cartography Department.Though he published numerous articles on geometry, he also worked on other aspects of mathematics:algebraic invariants, recurrent series, probabilities.It is above all his work on the application of geometry to calculus on which his reputation is founded, and his name is still associated with nomography.He very quickly sought to apply these methods to the production of graphs that would replace calculus by the use of preprepared drawings.For the first time, it became possible to represent equations with more than three variables in graphic form.All these methods were described in 1999 in his magnum opus “Treaties on nomography”, to which he added numerous applications.Not only did he supply a general theory that allows them to be classified systematically, but with the aligned points method, he was able to represent functions using the tangential field instead of the punctual field.During the Great War, the design office set up to apply graphical calculus used nomograms for all calculations involved in artillery fire.For example, in 1917, the use of these graphs reduced the time needed to prepare firing from 15 minutes to less than 3. He was also director of the Mathematics Library of France, Chairman of the Mathematical Society of France and became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1922. Between 1930 and 1936, he published the three volume “Men and Objects of Science”… but less well known are his literary essays or his comedy “La Candidate”, published under the pseudonyms Pierre Delix or Philbert Du Plessis !

 

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