Adhémar Barré De Saint-Venant
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Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant (; 23 August 1797 – 6 January 1886) was a
mechanician A mechanician is an engineer or a scientist working in the field of mechanics, or in a related or sub-field: engineering or computational mechanics, applied mechanics, geomechanics, biomechanics, and mechanics of materials. Names other than m ...
and mathematician who contributed to early
stress analysis Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology) Stress, whether physiological, biological or psychological, is an organism's response to a stressor, such as an environmental condition or change in life circumstances. When s ...
and also developed the unsteady open channel flow shallow water equations, also known as the Saint-Venant equations that are a fundamental set of equations used in modern
hydraulic engineering Hydraulic engineering as a sub-discipline of civil engineering is concerned with the flow and conveyance of fluids, principally water and sewage. One feature of these systems is the extensive use of gravity as the motive force to cause the move ...
. The one-dimensional Saint-Venant equation is a commonly used simplification of the shallow water equations. Although his full surname was Barré de Saint-Venant, in mathematical literature other than French he is known as Saint-Venant. His name is also associated with Saint-Venant's principle of statically equivalent systems of load, Saint-Venant's theorem and for Saint-Venant's compatibility condition, the integrability conditions for a symmetric tensor field to be a strain. In 1843 he published the correct derivation of the
Navier–Stokes equations The Navier–Stokes equations ( ) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances. They were named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and the Irish physicist and mathematician Georg ...
for a viscous flow and was the first to "properly identify the coefficient of viscosity and its role as a multiplying factor for the velocity gradients in the flow". Even though he published before Stokes, the equations do not bear his name. Barré de Saint-Venant developed a version of
vector calculus Vector calculus or vector analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with the differentiation and integration of vector fields, primarily in three-dimensional Euclidean space, \mathbb^3. The term ''vector calculus'' is sometimes used as a ...
similar to that of
Grassmann Hermann Günther Grassmann (, ; 15 April 1809 – 26 September 1877) was a German polymath known in his day as a linguistics, linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical w ...
(now understood as exterior
differential form In mathematics, differential forms provide a unified approach to define integrands over curves, surfaces, solids, and higher-dimensional manifolds. The modern notion of differential forms was pioneered by Élie Cartan. It has many applications ...
s) which he published in 1845.J Itard, Biography in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York 1970–1990) A dispute arose between Saint-Venant and Grassmann over priority for this invention. Grassmann had published his results in 1844, but Barré de Saint-Venant claimed he had developed the method in 1832. Barré de Saint-Venant was born at the château de Fortoiseau, Villiers-en-Bière, Seine-et-Marne, France. His mother was Marie-Thérèse Josèphe Laborie (born Saint-Domingue, 1769). His father was Jean Barré de Saint-Venant, (1737–1810), a colonial officer of the Isle of
Saint-Domingue Saint-Domingue () was a French colonization of the Americas, French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1659 to 1803. The name derives from the Spanish main city on the isl ...
(later
Haiti Haiti, officially the Republic of Haiti, is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and south of the Bahamas. It occupies the western three-eighths of the island, which it shares with the Dominican ...
). Barré de Saint-Venant would follow in his father's footsteps in science, entering the
École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...
, in 1813 at sixteen years old, and studying under Gay-Lussac. Graduating in 1816 he worked for the next 27 years as an engineer, initially his passion for chemistry led him a post as a ''élève-commissaire'' (student commissioner) for the Service des Poudres et Salpêtres (Powders and Saltpeter Service) and then as a civil engineer at the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées. He married in 1837, Rohaut Fleury from Paris. Following a disagreement on an issue of road with the Municipal Administration of Paris, he was suddenly retired as "Chief Engineer, second class", on 1 April 1848. In 1850 Saint-Venant won a contest to be appointed the chair of Agricultural Engineering at the Agronomic Institute of Versailles, a post he occupied two years. E. Sarrau, Adhémar-Jean-Claude BARRÉ de SAINT-VENANT (1797–1886), ''le Livre du Centenaire de l'Ecole polytechnique'', 1897

/ref> He went on to teach mathematics at the École des Ponts et Chaussées (National school of Civil Engineering) where he succeeded
Coriolis Coriolis may refer to: * Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis (1792–1843), French mathematician, mechanical engineer and scientist * Coriolis force In physics, the Coriolis force is a pseudo force that acts on objects in motion within a frame of ref ...
. In 1868, at 71 years old, he was elected to succeed
Poncelet The poncelet (symbol p) is an obsolete unit of power, once used in France and replaced by (ch, metric horsepower). The unit was named after Jean-Victor Poncelet.François Cardarelli, ''Encyclopaedia of Scientific Units, Weights and Measures: T ...
in the mechanics section of the
Académie des Sciences The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...
, and continued research work for a further 18 years. He died in January 1886 at Saint-Ouen, Loir-et-Cher. Sources differ on his date of death: gives 6 January whereas 22 January. In 1869 he was given the title 'Count' ( comte) by
Pope Pius IX Pope Pius IX (; born Giovanni Maria Battista Pietro Pellegrino Isidoro Mastai-Ferretti; 13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878) was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878. His reign of nearly 32 years is the longest verified of any pope in hist ...
.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barre De Saint-Venant, Adhemar Jean Claude Barre École Polytechnique alumni ENSTA Paris alumni École des Ponts ParisTech alumni Corps des ponts 19th-century French mathematicians Members of the French Academy of Sciences French fluid dynamicists Papal counts 1797 births 1886 deaths Members of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities