Condorcet

Marquis de Condorcet was born in 1743 in Picardy, north of France. His family originated in Dauphine, and he was among the last of the French philosophers who dealt with social and political issues. Rather than pursuing a career in the army, Condorcet decided to become a mathematician. His mathematical abilities turned out to be not as outstanding as those of his contemporaries, such as Pierre Simon de Laplace and Leonard Euler. He was elected to the Academie des Sciences at the age of twenty-five. He became its secretary at the age of thirty-two. When he was thirty-eight, in 1780 he was became a member of the August Academie Francais. His main achievement was using mathematics in social sciences, where mathematical achievements can be applied to human actions. In 1785 he wrote the Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions. He made some advances in mathematics...