A quarrel between Joseph Liouville and Guillaume Libri at the French Academy of Sciences in the middle of the nineteenth century (Q549915)

The paper is devoted to the discussion of the controversy that arose in 1843 at the French Academy of Sciences between Joseph Liouville and Guillaume Libri. The author reconstructs the social context of the controversy and analyzes the positions that Liouville and Libri occupied within the scientific field and the public space. Further the different social spaces in which the controversy took place are examined. Finally the mathematical arguments developed by Libri and Liouville are considered.