credited as originating the operational calculus. Politics and religious beliefs Augustin-Louis Cauchy grew up in the house of a staunch royalist. This made his father flee with the family to Arcueil during the French Revolution. Their life there during that time was apparently hard; Augustin-Louis's father, Louis François, spoke of living on rice, bread, and crackers during the period. A paragraph from an undated letter from Louis François to his mother in Rouen says: In any event, he inherited his father's staunch royalism and hence refused to take oaths to any government after the overthrow of Charles X. He was an equally staunch Catholic and a member of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. He also had links to the Society of Jesus and defended them at the Academy when it was politically unwise to do so. His zeal for his faith may have led to his caring for Charles Hermite during his illness and leading Hermite to become a faithful Catholic. It also inspired Cauchy to plead on behalf of the Irish during the Great Famine of Ireland. His royalism and religious zeal made him contentious, which caused difficulties with his colleagues. He felt that he was mistreated for his beliefs, but his opponents felt he intentionally provoked people by berating them over religious matters or by defending the Jesuits after they had been suppressed. Niels Henrik Abel called him a "bigoted Catholic" and added he was "mad and there is nothing that can be done about him", but at the same time praised him as a mathematician. Cauchy's views were widely unpopular among mathematicians and when Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was made chair in mathematics before him he, and many others, felt his views were the cause. When Libri was accused of stealing books he was replaced by Joseph Liouville rather than Cauchy, which caused a rift between Liouville and Cauchy. Another dispute with political overtones concerned Jean-Marie Constant Duhamel and a claim on inelastic shocks. Cauchy was later shown, by Jean-Victor Poncelet, to be wrong. See also List of topics named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy Cauchy–Binet formula Cauchy boundary condition Cauchy's convergence test Cauchy (crater) Cauchy determinant Cauchy distribution Cauchy's equation Cauchy–Euler equation Cauchy's functional equation Cauchy horizon Cauchy formula for repeated integration Cauchy–Frobenius lemma Cauchy–Hadamard theorem Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem Cauchy momentum equation Cauchy–Peano theorem Cauchy principal value Cauchy problem Cauchy product Cauchy's radical test Cauchy–Rassias stability