The Geometer Who Moved Mountains — and Followed Napoleon Into the Sand
Gaspard Monge: The Genius Who Transformed Warfare with Geometry! How a fortification secret and a memoir about shifting piles of dirt made Gaspard Monge indispensable to modern engineering, French statecraft, and — two centuries later — artificial intelligence BLUF Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) invented descriptive geometry , the disciplined method for representing three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional projections that still underlies every engineering and architectural drawing; founded differential geometry ; helped build the metric system and the École Polytechnique ; and served the French Republic as Minister of the Navy before attaching himself, with near-total devotion, to Napoleon Bonaparte. His clearest legacy, however, was one he barely noticed: a slim 1781 memoir on the cheapest way to move a pile of earth defined what is now called the Monge problem of optimal transport — a field that lay largely dormant for 160 years, then exploded into one of the most active areas...