Born in Nancy, Meurthe, France, Tissot was trained as an engineer in the French Army, from which he graduated as capitaine du génie.
Around the same time, he indulged a research program meant to determine the best way of cartographic projection for a particular region and presented his findings to the French Académie des Sciences.
Carl Friedrich Gauss had also studied the subject before Tissot's contributions later in the nineteenth century.
[7] Even in the more restrained Anglo-American academic world, a columnist of Science, a publication sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, hailed Tissot's method and encouraged his readers to study his work in the hope that such a study "will lead to the adoption of better projections than those which are at present in use.
"[8] The legacy of Tissot’s method is still vivid today, as suggested by the authors of Map Projections for Europe, who argue that since Tissot’s famous analysis regarding distortion, the only major scientific development in the metric interpretation of deformation has been Eduard Imhof's Verzerrungsgitter, or deformation grid.