Legendre, Adrien-Marie

LeChatelier Henry-Louis (1850-1936) Fr. metallurg., worked on chemistry of silicates and cements, physics of flames, thermodynamics, used first the dependence sample vs. environmental temperature, devised optical pyrometer LeChatelier Luis (1815-1926) Brit, mine eng., tested products with aluminum content, patented steel production, thermometry - use of thermocouples Legendre Adrien Marie (1752-1833) Fr. math., gave important works on elliptic integrals, laws of quadratic reciprocity, created spherical harmonics, known for Legendre transformations used in thermodynamics... 

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) Dutch physicist Leiden, Netherlands. Adrien Marie Legendre (1752-1833) French mathematician Paris, France. 

Specifically these are the associated Legendre polynomials of the first kind and are usually written as fimctions of cosO rather than 6. They are named after Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833), who discovered them as a general family of solutions to differential equations in spherical coordinates while he was working on a mathematical description of the motions of stars. His colleague, Simon-Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), then drew on the Legendre polynomials to formulate the three-dimensional spherical harmonics. 

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