Portrait Debacle
For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in 2005, books, paintings and articles have incorrectly shown a side-view portrait of the obscure French politician Louis Legendre (1752–1797) as that of the mathematician Legendre. The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre". The only known portrait of Legendre, recently unearthed, is found in the 1820 book Album de 73 portraits-charge aquarellés des membres de I’Institut, a book of caricatures of seventy-three famous mathematicians by the French artist Julien-Leopold Boilly as shown below:
Read more about this topic: Adrien-Marie Legendre
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