Laplace was born into the French middle class but died a Marquis having prospered as well during the French Revolution as during the monarchy. His name is well known to mathematicians both for his work on transformations and for his work on planetary motion. He had a deterministic view of the universe. Reputedly, his reply, when asked by Napoleon where God fitted in, was ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’. Napoleon appointed him as Minister of the Interior—but removed him six weeks later for trying ‘to carry the spirit of the infinitesimal into administration’. He studied under d’Alembert in Paris, where he later taught Poisson at the École Polytechnique. In Statistics he worked on many probability problems, including the Laplace distribution, and he is credited with independently discovering Bayes’s Theorem. He was elected FRS in 1789 and FRSE in 1813. A street in Paris is named after him, as is the Promontorium Laplace on the Moon.

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Laplace/RouseBall/RB_Laplace.html Fuller biography.