Pierre duhem

Pierre Duhem

By annabelleskyrojas

  • Pierre Duhem

    Pierre Duhem
    Pierre Duhem was born June 10, 1861 in Paris, France to Flemish parents. He began his education at the early age of seven, and entered college at age eleven after the tragic death of his mother and one of his sisters.

  • Education

    Education
    While still attending university, Duhem wrote his first paper on electrochemical cells. After graduating he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bordeaux, and was also known at this time for his work in thermodynamics and hydrodynamics. Anyone interested in thermodynamics or physical chemistry will find this video helpful in explaining the Gibbs-Duhem equation
    (https://youtu.be/utfxPRImBgw)

  • Les origines de la statique

    Les origines de la statique
    Written in 1905, out of the many works in his career, Les origines de la statique was argued to be the beginning of the history of medieval science and its influence on more modern scientists such as Da Vinci and Galileo. Les origines de la statique, 2 vols., Paris: Hermann. English Translation Grant F. Leneaux, Victor N. Vagliente, and Guy H. Wagener, The Origins of Statics, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991

  • Other Contributions

    Other Contributions
    The Duhem-Quine thesis was created by Pierre Duhem and William Quine. It stated that any outcome of an observation has more than one explanation, and hypotheses have to have predictions based on previously corroborated hypotheses. In the 3 years leading up to Duhem's death, he was in the process of writing Le Système du monde, a twelve volume work that accounts the cosmical system of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Ptolemy. Sadly he did not complete the series when he passed in 1916