The Man Who Flattened the Earth

Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment

Cloth $52.50 ISBN: 9780226793603 Published December 2002

Paper $32.50 ISBN: 9780226793610 Published June 2006

E-book $7.00 to $30.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226793627 Published November 2010

Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works to explore what it meant to do science and to be a man of science in eighteenth-century Europe.

Beginning his scientific career as a mathematician in Paris, Maupertuis entered the public eye with a much-discussed expedition to Lapland, which confirmed Newton's calculation that the earth was flattened at the poles. He also made significant, and often intentionally controversial, contributions to physics, life science, navigation, astronomy, and metaphysics. Called to Berlin by Frederick the Great, Maupertuis moved to Prussia to preside over the Academy of Sciences there. Equally at home in salons, cafés, scientific academies, and royal courts, Maupertuis used his social connections and his printed works to enhance a carefully constructed reputation as both a man of letters and a man of science. His social and institutional affiliations, in turn, affected how Maupertuis formulated his ideas, how he presented them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked.

Terrall not only illuminates the life and work of a colorful and important Enlightenment figure, but also uses his story to delve into many wider issues, including the development of scientific institutions, the impact of print culture on science, and the interactions of science and government. Smart and highly readable, Maupertuis will appeal to anyone interested in eighteenth-century science and culture.

“Terrall’s work is scholarship in the best sense. Her explanations of arcane 18th-century French physics, mathematics, astronomy, and biology are among the most lucid available in any language.”—Virginia Dawson, American Historical Review

Winner of the 2003 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society

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"Recreating the scientific world in the first half of 18th-century Europe, Mary Terrall underlines the extent to which this was a public world, not secluded in institutions. . . . As a guide to the public world of post-Newtonian European science, this well-written, scholarly work has much to offer."—Jeremy Black, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Mary Terrall catches [Maupertuis's] self-image well, from beginning to end, but she goes far beyond it. Most of his biographers have paid too much attention to it, and to the Lapland episode. While she has found an Earth-flattening title irresistible, she has managed to include much of value on the social background, and on religious, philosophical and biological currents of thought. . . . As Terrall's commendable book indicates, there was much substance to his achievements, social and intellectual. We can take him seriously at last."

"Terrall's book promises the possibility that Maupertuis will be put at the fore of the science in his age. . . . A qualified historian's highly professional and objective work on a talented and original man of sciences of the enlightenment. . . . I cordially recommend Terrall's clever and fascinating book to both scholars and students who are interested in the history of science in 18th century Europe."

"As a biography of Maupertuis, Terrall's book is outstanding. She uses a wealth of sources . . . to paint a full picture not just of the events of his life, but of the forces that shaped his work and the reactions to it. . . . Well presented and readable, this is invaluable material for any analysis of Maupertuis's work. . . . Anyone wanting to work in this area . . . will want to refer repeatedly to this book."—David Beeson, Eighteenth Century Thought

2003 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society

“Terrall’s work covers the vast range of Maupertuis’ interests by situating him in the thicket of the republic of letters. . . . She sees that Maupertuis promoted a public science in those fashionable circles in which one might have encountered the Encyclopedistes. But more importantly, Terrall reveals how it is that the expanding audience was increasingly important—as much as established role of academies and kings—in legitimizing the investigation of nature.”

“This stylish and beautifully written study adds much to our knowledge of Enlightenment science. Terrall writes cogently about the sometimes recondite problems that Maupertuis addressed, and she is entirely convincing in her claim that he succeeded as a man of science because he was equally adept as a man of letters.”—Elizabeth A. Williams, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“This book provides a skillfully rendered picture of the world of eighteenth-century science and richly repays close reading.”—James Evans, <I>American Journal of Physics

“A fascinating and well-written account of a colorful scientist, scholar and administrator, one of the foremost figures of the European Enlightenment. It shows how a role was constructed for science and mathematics, and how that role included philosophy, administration and politics, much as it does today.”—Ed Sandifer, <I>MAA Online

“One might have anticipated a dramatic tale set against a backdrop of a great age of scientific discovery. Instead, Terrall starts with Maupertuis’s outlandish portrait (which adorns the dust jacket) and uses it to launch both a full and colourful life and to delve deep into some of the many wider issues of 18th-century science, culture, and government. In the process, it makes an important new contribution to the study of the European Enlightenment. In fact this book extends well beyond the scope of the ‘little history’ format, skillfully retaining its dynamic quality but also moving well beyond the limitations of the genre.”--<I>History Today

“A highly readable narrative. To my knowledge, there is no comparable study of this subject, and nobody better qualified than Mary Terrall to write one. This work has the potential to put Maupertuis at the center of scholars’ map of the sciences in enlightened Europe.”—Jan Golinski, author of Making Natural Knowledge

“A wonderful read. This book’s virtue lies less in the new ‘theoretical’ ground it breaks than in the way it connects Maupertuis’s careerism to his intellectual endeavors, without in any way suggesting that one reduces the other. I cannot point to another book about a scientist that so convincingly puts into practice a claim about the relationship between the inception of new knowledge and its reception.”<Ken Alder, author of The Measure of All Things

“This fine book offers a fascinating tour of many of the most important literary and scientific centres of the European Enlightenment. A clever and sympathetic historian, Mary Terrall offers a highly readable biography that at last gives Maupertuis’s extraordinary fieldwork in Lapland and his bizarrely ingenious pamphlets the scrutiny they deserve. Especially impressive here are detailed contextualised readings of Maupertuis’s voluminous and provocative writings. By so effectively demonstrating the manifold links between Maupertuis’s enterprises and Enlightenment society, Terrall’s book also has several suggestive lessons for more contemporary interests in the fate of public science.”<Simon Schaffer, coeditor of The Sciences in Enlightened Europe

"Terrall's book is well worth reading for any student of the Enlightenment, providing a rich source of new material and a range of important insights into the situation and circumstance of one of the period's most famous scientific and social apostates."—Ralp Kingston, European History Quarterly

"Anyone eager to learn more about the eighteenth century's debates over the calculus, mechanics, gravitational attraction, the shape of the earth, biological 'monsters,' and heredity will be both instructed and amused by The Man Who Flattened the Earth. . . . [Terrall's] narrative is so charmingly literary, so picaresque at times, that the Maupertuis she portrays is as inimitable as Beaumarchais's Figaro."—Alessa Johns, Eighteenth-Century Studies

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
A Note on Translations
1. Portrait of a Man of Science
2. From Saint-Malo to Paris
3. Mathematics and Mechanics in the Paris Academy of Sciences
4. The Expedition to Lapland
5. The Polemical Aftermath of the Lapland Expedition
6. Beyond Newton and on to Berlin
7. Toward a Science of Living Things
8. The Berlin Academy of Sciences
9. Teleology, Cosmology, and Least Action
10. Heredity and Materialism
11. The Final Years
Bibliography
Index

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History: European History | History of Ideas

History of Science

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