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Alexis Claude Clairaut was born at Paris on May 13, 1713, and died there on May 17, 1765. He belongs to the small group of children who, though of exceptional precocity, survive and maintain their powers when grown up. As early as the age of twelve he wrote a memoir on four geometrical curves; but his first important work was a treatise on tortuous curves, published when he was eighteen - a work which procured for him admission to the French Academy. In 1731 he gave a demonstration of the fact noted by Newton that all curves of the third order were projections of one of five parabolas.
In 1741 Clairaut went on a scientific expedition to measure the length of a meridian degree on the earth's surface, and on his return in 1743 he published his Thê©orie de la figure de la terre. This is founded on a paper by Maclaurin, wherein it had been shewn that a mass of homogeneous fluid set in rotation about a line through its centre of mass would, under the mutual attraction of its particles, take the form of a spheroid. This work of Clairaut treated of heterogeneous spheroids and contains the proof of his formula for the accelerating effect of gravity in a place of latitude l.
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