Siméon Denis Poisson was a major figure in French science throughout the first forty years of the nineteenth century. Though his papers lack the brilliant mathematical creativity of some of those published by even more gifted contemporaries such as Joseph Fourier and Augustin-Louis Cauchy , they nevertheless display a formidable talent for mathematical analysis, applied with great industry and success in a large number of investigations ranging over the whole domain of mathematical physics. Several were of such importance that even (...) on their own they would have sufficed to win him lasting fame. (shrink)