More about Coriolis

There are good short biographies of Coriolis on the web: the one at Wolfram research and another at the University of St Andrews. If you read these instead of my back cover, you'll find out that Coriolis assisted Cauchy at the École Polytechnique, not at the École Normale Supérieure. Rather than regurgitate the material contained in these places, I mention a couple of items that I found striking:

• When he received his appointment to the École Polytechnique in 1816, he wrote a letter to his mother and sister, expressing his joy at being able to send them half the money he would earn.
• His health was very frail, and he missed so many classes that his students nicknamed him Trompe-la-mort (the cheater of death).