Jean Paul de Gua de Malves

Jean Paul de Gua de Malves (* 1713 in Carcassonne, † June 2, 1785 in Paris) was a French clergyman, encyclopedist and mathematicians.

Life and work

Abbé Jean Paul de Gua de Malves was Prieur de Saint- George -de- Vigou and the son of Jean de Gua, baron de Malves and his wife Jeanne de Harrugue from the Languedoc. After a stay in Italy, he studied at the Société des Arts, a kind of scientific and technical Academy which had been founded in 1729 by Louis de Bourbon- Condé, comte de Clermont.

Abbé Jean Paul de Gua de Malves published in 1740 a work on analytical geometry in which he applied it to tangents and asymptotes to determine algebraic curves without the aid of the differential calculus. According to him, the set of de Gua is named.

The Parisian publisher and court printer André François Le Breton planned in 1745 a French edition of the English work by Ephraim Chambers in 1728 the Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences. To this end, he teamed up with three other publishers together, Antoine- Claude Briasson (1700-1775), Michel -Antoine David (1707-1769), Laurent Durand ( 1712-1763 ). With the organizational direction of the same Jean -Paul de Gua de Malves was commissioned. In 1747, but that was on his participation in this project and Denis Diderot took over its function and from the initial project was ou Dictionnaire raisonné the Encyclopédie des sciences, des arts et des métiers.