Fourier's Theory of heat

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier wrote his book "Théorie Analytique de la chaleur" in 1822. He was 54 years old then. Fourier was from 1798 to 1801 as an scientific advisor of Napoleon on the ``Egyptian expedition". A contingent of 167 scientists and scholars were coming with Napoleon, among them the Mathematicians Fourier and Monge. One knows now that some of the empirical work which later led to the "Theorie of heat" was founded in Egypt. Scientifically, the expedition led to some progress in the understanding of the hieroglyphs, in particular the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799. The trimmed version got also passed through optical character recognition (OCR) so that it is searchable although the program had some difficulty with the french language.

Click for a PDF of the colorized front page. The page had been vectorized, meaning that the matrix which gives the pixel values has been replaced by paths giving the strokes of the text. This allowed to colorize parts using inkscape. The vectorization program has to figure out boundaries, and render letters to paths.
There are some great paintings about the events. Examples of art showing the battle of the pyramids: Examples of art showing the battle of the nile: And the battle of Alexandria And a plan of the campaign: