Claude Alexis Clairaut was born in Paris in 1713, and died there in 1765. He was a youthful mathematical prodigy, composing in his eleventh year a treatise on curves of the third order. This early paper, and a singularly elegant subsequent one on the differential geometry of twisted curves in space, won him a seat in the French Academy of Sciences at the illegal age of 18. In 1736 he accompanied Pierre Louis Moreau de