Pierre Alphonse Laurent (July 18, 1813 – September 2, 1854) was a French mathematician best known as the discoverer of the Laurent series, an expansion of a function into an infinite power series, generalizing the Taylor series expansion. He was born in Paris, France. His result was contained in a memoir submitted for the Grand Prize of the Académie des Sciences in 1843, but his submission was after the due date, and the paper was not published and never considered for the prize. Laurent died at age 41 in Paris. His work was not published until after his death.