ABSTRACT
Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801-77) is an essential thinker in nineteenthcentury France. Educated at the Ecole Normale in Paris, he began a career as a mathematician, publishing in mechanics and probability theory; he then became Professor of Mechanics and Analysis at Lyons (1834), Rector of the Académie de Grenoble (1835) and General Inspector of Mathematics (1836). For a long time he was president of the jury for the teaching diploma in mathematics, a competition for recruiting teachers for secondary and higher education. Little sympathetic to the regime of the Second Empire, he left Paris in 1854, ending his career as Rector of the Académie de Dijon.
