In this talk we will don't speak about Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) but about Lagrange's reception at the nineteenth Century. "Who read Lagrange at this Times?", "Why and How?", "What does it mean being a mathematician or doing mathematics at this Century" are some of the questions of our conference. We will give some elements of answers and the case Lagrange will be a pretext in order to explain what are doing historians of mathematics: searching archives and – thanks to a methodology – trying to understand, read and write the Past.
Lagrange - mathematical press - complete works - bibliographic index of mathematical sciences (1894-1912) - Liouville - Boussinesq - Terquem[-]

The most important works of the young Lagrange were two very learned memoirs on sound and its propagation. In a tour de force of mathematical analysis, he solved the relevant partial differential equations in a novel manner and he applied the solutions to a number of acoustic problems. Although Euler and d'Alembert may have been the only contemporaries who fully appreciated these memoirs, their contents anticipated much more of Fourier analysis than is usually believed. On the physical side, Lagrange properly explained the functioning of string and air-column instruments, although he did not accept harmonic analysis as we now understand it.
Lagrange - acoustics - propagation of sound - harmonic analysis - Fourier analysis - vibrating strings - organ pipes[-]

The introduction of wavelets in the mid 80's has significantly reshaped some areas of the scientific landscape by establishing bridges between previously disconnected domains, and eventually leading to a new paradigm. This generally accepted-yet loose-claim can be given a more precise form by exploiting bibliometric databases such as the ISI Web of Science. Preliminary results in this direction will be reported here, based on multiple entries where authors, references, keywords and disciplines are used as nodes of a network in which the links correspond to their co-appearance in the same paper. While the evolution in time of such an « heterogeneous net » gives a quantified perspective on the birth and growth of wavelets as a well-identified scientific field of its own, it also raises many interpretation issues (related, e.g., to automation vs. expertise) whose implications go beyond this peculiar case study.

Keywords : wavelets - history - bibliometry - network, paradigm[-]