Johann Heinrich Lambert was born on the 26th of August 1728 in Switzerland. He was born in the city of Mulhouse. Lambert left school at the age of 12. Considering this it might be a surprise he became a hero. After leaving school.he went to do many different jobs. This included being an assistant of his father that was a tailor. He also was a clerk, a private tutor and a secretary. In the to e that was left he was studying more and more.
With his earnings he started to travel through Europe. He visited German states, the Netherlands, France and some Italian states. During his trips Johann Heinrich Lambert met many mathicians. His travels too like two years. After returning to Chur he published his first book. Lambert also was looking for an academic job. He found it eventually in the Prussian academy of sciences in Berlin in 1763.
At this academy he was working hard till his dead. He died with the age of 49 on the 25th of September in 1777. In this fourteen year period he did some amazing things that makes him a GPS hero.
As mentioned Lambert did a lot. Here there is a list of his great work:
- He introduced hyperbolic functions into trigonometry
- He made conjectures regarding non-Euclidian space
- Lambert was the first person that proved that the number pi is irregular.
The reason though that we made him a knight of Apglos is his work on map projections.
Johann Heinrich Lambert was the first mathematician that could address the general properties of map projections of a spherical earth. He was the first to discuss the properties of conform!ality and equal area preservation. In 1772, only 5 years before his dead, he published seven map projections. At that time they were new, but nowadays we are still using them. Some of his map projections are used than others. The map transformations of Lambert are:
- Lambert conformal conic
- Transverse Mercator
- Lambert azimuthal equal area
- Lagrange projection
- Lambert cylindrical equal area
- Transverse cylindrical equal area
- Lambert conical equal area
According to the Wikipedia page of Johann Heinrich Lambert, Lambert influenced Kant. We assume that Wikipedia means Immanuel Kant but we guess it influenced the Apglos directors too. One of them has the name Kant.