François Arago

James Lequeux completed his PhD thesis in radioastronomy in 1962 and was an assistant, then associate, professor of physics and astronomy at Paris University until 1966. He was an Astronomer from 1966-1999 and an invited scientist at CalTech from 1968-1969. Dr. Lequeux was also the Director of the Marseilles Observatory from 1983-1988 and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics for 15 years. He retired in 1999 and then began work on the history of astronomy, a subject he presently writes about. Dr. Lequeux has published over 403 papers and five books, including The Interstellar Medium (Springer 2005) and Le Verrier: Magnificent and Detestable Astronomer (Springer 2013).

“This book has great potential utility for the historian of astronomy and amply succeeds in its effort to reorient Arago’s legacy around his central role as astronomer while showing the breadth that the role could entail. … this book can be thought of as a corrective to a historical memory that has written astronomy out of Arago’s legacy.” (Theresa Levitt, Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 48 (2), 2017)“François Arago is a fine, scholarly work, fully footnoted, with a detailed bibliography. The layout and exposition are clear, making it easy to locate specific researches. It is very well written and easy to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned much from it, and warmly recommend it to everyone interested in early-19th-Century astronomy and physics.” (Allan Chapman, The Observatory, Vol. 136 (1252), June, 2016)

• The Scientific Life in France at the Time of Arago.- The Life of Arago.- The Nature of Light.- The Velocity of Light.- The Birth of Electromagnetism.- The Measurement of the Earth.- Arago and the Paris Observatory.- Arago, Astronomer.- Arago, Geophysicist and Meteorologist.- Towards Applied Physics.- The Promoter of Science and Technique.- The Heritage of Arago.