Auteur: Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem

Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (b. 1861)—an accomplished physicist, philosopher of physics, and historian of physics—ranked first in his class at the École Normale Supérieure, France’s most prestigious university, and first on the national physics concours exam for agrégation in 1885. In his third year at the École Normale, he was the first student ever in France’s grandes écoles to present himself for the doctor’s degree. The thesis, later reprinted as The Thermodynamic Potential and its Applications to Chemical Mechanics and to the Study of Electrical Phenomena, was rejected for political reasons. Undiscouraged, Duhem presented a second thesis, this time in mathematics, but on a similar theme, which the committee including Poincaré and Tannery accepted: On Magnetization by Induction. Duhem’s grand vision of subjecting all the branches physics—mechanics, chemistry, and even electromagnetism—to thermodynamic first-principles continued to permeate all his works until his death in 1916.