Soil mechanics and the stability of a fortification wall
Charles Coulomb, at the time a military engineer in the French colony of Martinique, presented in 1773 to the Paris Academy of Sciences the memoir Sur une application des règles de maximis et minimis à quelques problèmes de statique, relatifs à l'architecture. The work applied the calculus of variations to three engineering problems: the stability of a masonry column, the thrust of an arch, and the collapse of a fortress wall under the pressure of the soil behind it. The last problem was directly tied to the practice of fortification: at what wall thickness a ditch could be dug without the wall itself collapsing.
The memoir turned out to be a turning point for the nineteenth century. It laid the foundations of soil mechanics and the theory of structures; Coulomb himself will later apply the same devices to electrostatics and magnetism. The fortress ceased to be a genre of practice and became an object of calculation: what had been solved by trial and error was now derived from formulas.
Why this date
exact: paper presented at the Paris Academy in 1773; printed 1776 in the Academy's Mémoires for the year 1773.
Node sources
- MacTutor History of Mathematics, «Charles Augustin de Coulomb» Verified 5 Oct 2026
he presented his first work to the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1773. This work, Sur une application des règles, de maximis et minimis à quelque problèmes de statique, relatifs à l'architecture
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