"Lambert was an 18th century Alsatian scholar, who is today regarded as a physicist, geometer, statistician, astronomer and philosopher and a representative of German rationalism. ...Among the achievements of Lambert... are the discovery of ; the formulation of laws governing light absorption, and thereby the establishment of photometry; the formulation of a law of motion of comets or planets. He is among the first to appreciate the nature of the Milky Way; he established several theorems of non-Euclidean geometry, developed De Moivre's theorems on the trigonometry of complex variables and introduced the hyperbolic sine and cosine functions. He proved the irrationality of π and π2, created a general theory of errors and finally, was the first to express Newton's second law of motion in the notation of the differential calculus."