Joseph Fourier

Joseph Fourier was an orphan educated by Benedictines who taught at the École Polytechnique, went to Egypt with Napoleon as scientific adviser and secretary of the Institute there, and served as prefect of the Isère, where he drained the marshes and built the road to Turin. The Analytical Theory of Heat of 1822 solved the problem of how heat spreads through a body by representing any function as a sum of sines and cosines, the Fourier series, which turned out to describe everything that vibrates. He also proposed that the atmosphere warms the earth, the first description of the greenhouse effect.