In a side yard of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris is a marble statue
of a man dressed to suggest an ancient Greek philosopher and holding
an egg which he appears to be studying raptly.  The depiction stirred
a memory in me of some story I'd read long ago, about some philosopher
or mathematician contemplating an egg and coming to some insight or
discovery.  Archimedes?  Euclid?  Pythagoras?  I could not pull out a
clear memory of it.

My friend, who had no such recollection but only looked at the statue,
thought of it in terms of contemplating life, but I thought it had
more to do with the physical properties of the ovoid form than with
its part in procreation.

This particular statue may not be of any special note.  It was not
given any prominence and actually appeared to be sidelined.  There was
no legible inscription on the base other than the date 1890; a name
that seems to begin with S was otherwise unreadable.  But that doesn't
matter so much.  What I am looking for here is not information about
this statue per se but about the philosopher or scientist who is
depicted in this way, studying an egg, and the story that goes with
him.  Can you satisfy this point of curiosity?

Thank you,
Archae0pteryx

Hi, ive found on a number of pages that this philosepher/mathematician
guy was actually studiying a "dragons egg".

I don't know if this will help at all.

magnetic_candle

Well, magnetic_candle, that's a helpful start.  In reality, of course,
it had to be something other than a dragon's egg, but that might be
the way the story went.

But which philosopher/mathematician was it??  That's what I want to
know.  The sculptor evidently assumed that the story would be familiar
enough to be recognizable.

Archae0pteryx

There's a legend of the poet Virgil enchanting an egg to safeguard the
foundations of Naples (Neopolis = New City).

regards, mathtalk-ga