Augustin-Louis Cauchy

Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He almost single handedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra. Cauchy was a prolific writer; he wrote approximately eight hundred research articles and five complete textbooks on a variety of topics in the fields of mathematics and mathematical physics.