Pierre Louis Maupertuis | Maupertuis' principle | Maupertuis |
He and his brother Rorgo confirmed charters for the abbeys of Saint-Maixent and Saint-Cyprien and that of Nouaillé.
His advice ignored, King John II decided to engage the English at Nouaillé-Maupertuis, south of Poitiers.
In classical mechanics, Maupertuis' principle (named after Pierre Louis Maupertuis), is that the path followed by a physical system is the one of least length (with a suitable interpretation of path and length).
Barbour and Bertotti conjectured that Jacobi's principle and a mechanism they called best matching were construction principles for a fully Machian theory.
By measuring the length of the arc, Maupertuis' team was able to prove that the Earth is, indeed, flattened at the poles as sir Isaac Newton had predicted.
Maupertuis had already appeared as a character in Lane's Doctor Who/Sherlock Holmes crossover novel, All-Consuming Fire.