Antoine Augustin Cournot was born at Gray, in Haute-Saône, France, on Aug. 28, 1801. He received his early schooling in his native town, and his first special discipline in mathematics at the Lycée de Besançon. In 1821 he entered the École Normale at Paris, where he continued his mathematical studies. He became Professor of Mathematics at Lyons in 1834, and the year following Rector of the Academy at Grenoble. In 1838 appeared his Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses, of which the present work is a translation. In the same year Cournot was called to Paris as Inspecteur Général des Études. He was made Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1838, and Officer in 1845. He became Rector of the Academy at Dijon in 1854, but in 1862 retired from active teaching. From this time to the end of his life he was busily engaged in writing. His Principes mathèmatiques having met with little or no success, in 1863 he paraphrased it in popular language under the title Principes de la théorie des richesses, which was further amplified in 1876 as Revue sommaire des doctrines économiques. He died in the following year, on March 31, in Paris.
Among Cournot's mathematical writings may be mentioned his Traité élémentaire de la théorie des fonctions et du calcul infinitésimal, 1841; De l'origine et des limites de la correspondence entre l'algèbre et la géométrie, 1847; and Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités, 1843. In the last-named work he showed how to apply the theory of chances to Statistics.
