Artist unknown
Johann Heinrich Lambert was born on August 26, 1728 in the city of Mulhouse, then an enclave of Switzerland (now part of France). He was largely self-educated, going to school only until age 12. By age 17 he assumed the job of secretary to a newspaper publisher in nearby Basel, Switzerland. He also began to work as a private tutor. At age 20 he became tutor to three boys in the family of Count Peter von Salis in Chur, Switzerland, a position he held for 10 years. There he had access to the count’s large library and was able to travel widely in Europe with his charges. In 1755, he began to publish scientific articles on a number of subjects. In 1756, he traveled with his pupils to Göttingen in Germany where he met Tobias Mayer and was elected a member of the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Royal Society for the Sciences). In 1759, he published his work on light measurement, Photometria [1], introducing his mathematical formula for the law of absorption of light (Lambert’s law), described non-mathematically a few years earlier by Pierre Bouguer. In 1764, he followed an invitation by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler to come to Berlin where, after some initial difficulties, Frederic II appointed him to a position in the Königlich-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences). Lambert established an important position as mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and philosopher. He also had considerable interest in the art of painting. Among many other achievements, Lambert was the first to mathematically prove the irrationality of the number π. He died on September 25, 1777 in Berlin, Germany [2].
26.1 Lambert’s Color Order System
Lambert’s illustration of his triangular color pyramid [4]