Jean-Charles de Borda

Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda (1733 to 1799) was a French mathematician, physicist and Navy officer, born in Dax, who invented the Borda count system for elections, a ranked preferential voting system formulated in 1770 that served as the basis for other voting systems such as Black's method and Nanson's method. The French Academy of Sciences used his method to elect its members for about two decades, until Napoleon Bonaparte insisted on his own method after becoming president of the Academie in 1801. He is also known for the Borda Carnot equation in fluid dynamics, for his method of reducing lunar distance for computing the longitude, and for instruments that defined the metre. With the arrival of the metric system he constructed tables of logarithms of sines, secants and tangents from 1792, published in 1801 after his death. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1764.