Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński was a Polish philosopher, mathematician, physicist, inventor, lawyer, occultist and economist. In 1794 he served in Poland's Kościuszko Uprising as a second lieutenant of artillery, was taken prisoner, and remained until 1797 in the Russian Army. After resigning in the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1798, he studied in the Holy Roman Empire until 1800, when he enlisted in the Polish Legion at Marseille. In 1803, Wroński joined the Marseille Observatory but was forced to leave the observatory after his theories were dismissed as grandiose rubbish.
Although most of his inflated claims were groundless, his mathematical work contains flashes of deep insight and many important intermediary results, the most significant of which was his work on series. The coefficients in Wroński's new series proved important after his death, forming a determinant now known as the Wronskian (the name which Thomas Muir had given them in 1882).