Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him. He is also known for his contributions to the method of least squares, and was the first to officially publish on it, though Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered it before him.
Watercolor caricature by Julien-Léopold Boilly (see § Mistaken portrait), the only known portrait of Legendre
Legendre's grave at the Auteuil cemetery
1820 watercolor caricatures of the French mathematicians Adrien-Marie Legendre (left) and Joseph Fourier (right) by French artist Julien-Léopold Boilly, watercolor portrait numbers 29 and 30 of Album de 73 portraits-charge aquarellés des membres de I'Institut.
Side view sketching of French politician Louis Legendre (1752–1797), whose portrait had been mistakenly used, for nearly 200 years, to represent French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, i.e. up until 2005 when the mistake was discovered.
The method of least squares is a parameter estimation method in regression analysis based on minimizing the sum of the squares of the residuals made in the results of each individual equation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
