Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (; ; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was an influential French scholar whose work was important to the development of
mathematics,
statistics,
physics, and
astronomy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume
Mécanique Céleste (
Celestial Mechanics) (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of
classical mechanics to one based on
calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the
Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.