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Joseph Louis-Lagrange was born into a wealthy family. His father served
as a fiscal counsel to the king of Sardinia, but lost the family fortune
in a series of faulty investments. Lagrange later claimed that if he
had been rich, he would have most certainly idled his life away, but
because he was poor, by necessity he was forced to acquire an education.
His fiscal situation kept him out of private schools, and most of his
basic education came from books of his own choosing. His earliest papers
were concerned with topics in applied physics, specifically astronomy
and optics theory. His talent for mathematics was discovered at an early
age. By age 19, he had his first teaching job. He extended differential
equations into the areas of fluid mechanics. Towards this end, he developed
the method of variation of parameters for solving certain classes of
ordinary partial derivatives. He also made contributions in the field
of probability. He is responsible for the first known proof of the four-squares
property, which states that every positive integer can be expressed
as the sum of four squares. Towards the end of his life, Lagrange was
inducted into the Legion of Honor by Napoleon.
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