François-Joseph Servois

He suffered from poor health during his years as an officer and this led to him requesting a non-active military position as a professor of mathematics.

Like many of his colleagues who taught at the military schools in France, Servois closely followed the developments in mathematics and sought to make original contributions to the subject.

Through his experience in the military, his first publication, Solutions peu connues de différents problèmes de géométrie pratique (Little-known Solutions to Various Problems in Practical Geometry), where he drew on notions of modern geometry and applied them to practical problems, was well received and prominent French mathematician, Jean-Victor Poncelet, considered it to be "a truly original work, notable for presenting the first applications of theory of transversals to the geometry of the ruler or surveyor's staff, thus revealing the fruitfulness and utility of this theory"[5]Servois presented several memoirs to the Académie des Sciences at this time including one on the principles of differential calculus and the development of functions in series.

He would further publish papers to the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées, where his friend, Joseph Diaz Gergonne was the editor, where he started to formalize his position on the foundations of calculus.

As a disciple of Joseph-Louis Lagrange, he strongly believed that structure of calculus should be based on power series as opposed to limits or infinitesimals.

Servois' 1814 Essai was published well before the modern definitions of functions, identities and inverses, so in his paper, he attempted to formalize these ideas by defining their behavior.

"[8]Servois went on to publish two more articles in the Annales des mathématiques pures et appliquées, but they were far less influential than his previous papers.