List of Famous people with last name Fourier

Peter Fourier was a French canon regular who is honored as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Foregoing offers of high office, he served for many years as an exemplary pastor in the village of Mattaincourt in the Vosges. He was a strong proponent of free education and also helped to found a religious congregation of canonesses regular dedicated to the care of poor children, developing a new pedagogy for this.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier's law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.

François Marie Charles Fourier was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream thinking in modern society. For instance, Fourier is credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837.