Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist. He was one of the first to rigorously state and prove the key theorems of calculus, pioneered the field complex analysis, and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra. Cauchy also contributed to a number of topics in mathematical physics, notably continuum mechanics.

Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations.