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Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was born on June 10, 1861, in Paris, France. His parents were Pierre-Joseph Duhem and Marie-Alexandrine Fabre. He was born in a neighborhood on the Rue des Jeûneurs, near the Grands Boulevards, just South of Montmartre.
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Pierre Duhem studied at the Collège Stanislas and École Normale Supérieure before teaching at Lille and Rennes. When he was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bordeaux (1894), he was also known for work in thermodynamics and hydrodynamics(Ariew).
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As a physicist, he championed “energetics,” holding generalized thermodynamics as foundational for physical theory, that is, thinking that all of chemistry and physics, including mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, should be derivable from thermodynamic first principles(Ariew).
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Duhem made a number of lasting improvements to thermodynamics and physical chemistry. Some of these improvements were, the Duhem–Margules and Gibbs–Duhem equations, which handle with reversible processes in thermodynamics as quasi-static limiting processes and give a general proof of the Gibbs phase rule(Britannica).
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In 1913 he started his printing of the material Le Système du monde; Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques, de Platon à Copernic (1913–17; “The World System; History of Cosmological Doctrines from Plato to Copernicus”), which eventually envisioned 10 volumes. There were only five volumes that were completed by the time of his death(Ariew).
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Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem died on September 14, 1916 in Cabrespine, France.
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Ariew, Roger. “Pierre Duhem.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 26 July 2018, plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/#LifWor. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Pierre Duhem.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 11 Sept. 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Pierre-Maurice-Marie-Duhem.
