Marc-Antoine Parseval

Who was Marc-Antoine Parseval?

Marc-Antoine Parseval des Chênes was a French mathematician, most famous for what is now known as Parseval's theorem, which presaged the unitarity of the Fourier transform.

He was born in Rosières-aux-Salines, in France, into an aristocratic French family, and married Ursule Guerillot in 1795, but divorced her soon thereafter. A monarchist opposed to the French revolution, imprisoned in 1792, Parseval later fled the country for publishing poetry critical of the government of Napoleon.

Later, he was nominated to the French Academy of Sciences five times, from 1796 to 1828, but was never elected. His only mathematical publications were, apparently, five papers, published in 1806 as Mémoires présentés à l'Institut des Sciences, Lettres et Arts, par divers savants, et lus dans ses assemblées. Sciences mathématiques et physiques. This combined the following earlier monographs:

"Mémoire sur la résolution des équations aux différences partielles linéaires du second ordre,".

"Mémoire sur les séries et sur l'intégration complète d'une équation aux différences partielles linéaires du second ordre, à coefficents constants,".