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[-]

Everything is under control: mathematics optimize everyday life.
In an empirical way we are able to do many things with more or less efficiency or success. When one wants to achieve a parallel parking, consequences may sometimes be ridiculous... But when one wants to launch a rocket or plan interplanetary missions, better is to be sure of what we do.
Control theory is a branch of mathematics that allows to control, optimize and guide systems on which one can act by means of a control, like for example a car, a robot, a space shuttle, a chemical reaction or in more general a process that one aims at steering to some desired target state.
Emmanuel Trélat will overview the range of applications of that theory through several examples, sometimes funny, but also historical. He will show you that the study of simple cases of our everyday life, far from insignificant, allow to approach problems like the orbit transfer or interplanetary mission design.[-]