Poncelet, Jean Victor [key], 1788–1867, French mathematician and army engineer. He taught at the school of mechanics at Metz and at the Faculté des Sciences and the École Polytechnique, both in Paris. While a prisoner of war (1813–14) in Russia during Napoleon I's campaign, he evolved the foundations of the modern form of projective geometry and incorporated his results in Traité des propriétés projectives des figures (1822; 2d ed., 2 vol., 1865–66).
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