Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, the French scientist and philosopher, was born in Saint-Malo, Brittany. Elected in 1723 to the Académie des Sciences (and to the Royal Society in 1728), he first became known for his work in geometry. The expedition that he led to Lapland in 1736 to measure a degree of meridian near the pole helped finally to prove that Earth was an oblate spheroid. With his early introduction of Newtonian theories into France, Maupertuis became a leading exponent among the philosophes of the ideal of experimentalism as opposed to the overly deductive method in science associated with the Cartesian tradition. In 1744 Frederick II of Prussia asked him to reorganize the Berlin Academy of Sciences and later appointed him as its president (1746–1759). The remainder of his career was intimately linked to the activities of this group, and the growth of the...