Louis Necker

Louis Necker, called de Germany (31 August 1730, Geneva – 31 July 1804, Cologny) was an 18th-century Swiss mathematician.

Biography

The elder brother of the statesman Jacques Necker, Louis Necker studied mathematics at the Academy of Geneva. He finished his studies in philosophy with a thesis on electricity (1747), then graduated in law (1751). He later was appointed governor of the princes of Nassau and de Lippe-Detmold during their stay in Geneva and managed a boarding school for young English held by his father Charles Frederick, lawyer and professor of law at the Geneva Academy.

In 1752 he purchased Jean Jallabert (fr)'s physics laboratory and in 1757 acceded the chair of mathematics and the honorary chair of Experimental Physics of the Academy of Geneva. In 1761 he was however forced to resign after a scandal of a private nature (Vernes-Necker case) and took refuge in Paris, where he joined the Girardot and Haller bankers in the Girardot Bank (fr). He also was a correspondent of the Académie royale des sciences from 1756 to 1767.

He founded a trading house in Marseille when, as a result of changes caused by the French Revolution, he thought it prudent to return to his homeland in 1791. The disgrace of his younger brother, Jacques contributed especially to this decision.

Works

• De Electricitate, 1747, in-4° ; dans le Recueil de l’Académie (savants étrangers), vol.IV. He solved this problem: finding the curve on which a sliding body by its weight in vacuum, in any point of the curve that starts to descend, always arrives in an equal time to the lowest point, assuming the resistance from the friction as a specific part of the pressure felt by the body on the rope.
• Article « Forces & Frottement », in the volume VII of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert.