Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and he purchased them back. From then on he lived both in Paris,
where he spent the autumn and winter months, and on his estate at
Montbard, where he was in residence for the pleasant spring and
summer months. At this time he took the additional name 'Buffon'
on gaining his estate and styled himself Georges-Louis Leclerc de
Buffon. His elevation to that of a Comte, or Count, came in 1773
when the government raised his estates to the status of a 'county'.
This change in his personal status came soon after a serious illness
that had nearly killed him, and this, no doubt, boosted his morale.
SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT
In Paris he continued his scientific education, and was soon intro-
duced to some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the city. He
decided that he should join the Acad´mie Royale des Sciences but to
gain admission he had to write some scholarly piece of work. In 1773
he wrote an account of a game he called Franc-Carreau, which was a
betting game played with counters on a tiled floor. The contestants bet
on the probability that a counter when thrown would land completely
inside a tile or would lie across the junction between two adjacent
tiles. Buffon discussed the problem of how to ensure the game was fair
to all players. He showed that this depended on the proportions of the
lengths of the sides of the tiles and indeed their shape. He went on to
experiment with changing probabilities caused by throwing different-
shaped counters and by 1777 when he finally published this work had
added needles to the counter types. This work gave rise to the name
'Buffon's Needle problem' - the first example of study in what is now
known by mathematicians as geometric probability theory.
He was admitted to the Acad´mie Royale des Sciences in 1774 as
a junior member, essentially an associate, and soon afterwards elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. This was surprising because
he had not published a great deal up to this time. He engaged in work
on the strength of timber, work that was valuable to the French
admiralty, and studied chemistry. In July 1739 he was appointed
Curator of the Jardin du Roi.
