Joseph-Louis Lagrange was born on January 25, 1736 in Turin, Italy. His father was an official in the Turin government and his mother was a medical doctor. He attended the College of Turin, intending to follow his mother in the field of medicine. However Lagrange discovered an interest and talent for mathematics, and soon began a collaboration with Leonard Euler. He was appointed a professor of mathematics at the Royal Artillery School in Turin in 1755, beginning a long and illustrious career in mathematics and the natural sciences. Lagrange was appointed Director of Mathematics at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1766. He left Berlin for Paris in 1787 to join the Académie des Sciences.
Lagrange made fundamental contributions in the calculus of variations, differential equations, number theory, and probability, and applied the mathematics to important problems in dynamics, mechanics, sound, and astronomy. His best known published work is Mécanique Analytique, published in 1788.
Lagrange died on April 10, 1813 in Paris.