Editing Adrien-Marie Legendre (section)

==Mistaken portrait==
For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in 2005, books, paintings and articles have incorrectly shown a profile portrait of the obscure French politician [[Louis Legendre]] (1752–1797) as a portrait of the mathematician. The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre" and appeared in a book along with contemporary mathematicians such as Lagrange. One of only two known portraits of Legendre, rediscovered in 2008, is found in the 1820 book ''Album de 73 portraits-charge aquarellés des membres de I'Institut'', a book of caricatures of seventy-three members of the Institut de France in Paris by the French artist [[Julien-Léopold Boilly]] as shown below.<ref name=Boilly>Boilly, Julien-Léopold. (1820). ''Album de 73 portraits-charge aquarellés des membres de I'Institut'' ([https://www.photo.rmn.fr/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&IID=2C6NU00YI4TE watercolor portrait] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220827170003/https://www.photo.rmn.fr/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&IID=2C6NU00YI4TE |date=27 August 2022 }} #29). Biliotheque de l'Institut de France.</ref><ref name="Duren2009">{{cite journal | last=Duren | first=Peter | title=Changing Faces: The Mistaken Portrait of Legendre | journal=[[Notices of the American Mathematical Society|Notices of the AMS]] | volume=56 | issue=11 |date=December 2009 | pages=1440–1443, 1455 | url=https://www.ams.org/notices/200911/rtx091101440p.pdf}}</ref> The other portrait is from the book ''Le Panthéon scientifique de la tour Eiffel''.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Nuttle |first=William |date=2022-09-17 |title=Mathematics of Choice — Adrien-Marie Legendre |url=https://medium.com/eiffels-paris-an-engineers-guide/mathematics-of-choice-adrien-marie-legendre-287cdd8052c2 |access-date=2025-05-18 |website=Eiffel’s Paris — an Engineer’s Guide |language=en}}</ref>

{{multiple image
| align = center
| width = 250
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| image1 = Legendre and Fourier (1820).jpg
| caption1 = 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''.<ref name=Boilly/>
| image2 = Louis Legendre.jpg
| caption2 = 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.<ref name="Duren2009"/>
}}