The Revolution's state engineering school
On 11 March 1794 the National Convention appointed the geometer Gaspard Monge to the commission that was to establish the École Centrale des Travaux Publics: the mass training of specialist engineers for the military needs of the young Republic. Monge brought here the programme of the military engineering school at Mézières, where he had taught descriptive geometry since the 1760s. In September 1795 the school was renamed École Polytechnique.
Here an engineer's training was built on a systematic mathematical course: analytic geometry, descriptive geometry, differential and integral calculus. The fortification and artillery problem, out of which applied science had grown in the eighteenth century, became a mass professional training of the scientist-engineer. Fourier, Poinsot, Ampère taught here; many mathematicians and physicists of the first half of the nineteenth century came from it.
Why this date
exact: on 11 March 1794 the Convention appoints Gaspard Monge to the commission to establish the École Centrale des Travaux Publics (renamed École Polytechnique in 1795). Teaching begins in June 1795.
Node sources
- MacTutor History of Mathematics, «Gaspard Monge» Verified 5 Oct 2026
Monge was appointed by the National Convention on 11 March 1794 to the body that was put in place to establish the École Centrale des Travaux Publics (soon to become the École Polytechnique).
"Verified" means that on that day the quotation was found at the address given, word for word. No date means we have not been able to open the source yet, not that the quotation is wrong.