As a teacher of mathematics Poisson is said to have been extraordinarily successful, as might have been expected from his early promise as a "répétiteur" at the École Polytechnique. As a scientific worker, his productivity has rarely if ever been equaled. Notwithstanding his many official duties, he found time to publish more than three hundred works, several of them extensive treatises, and many of them memoirs dealing with the most abstruse branches of pure mathematics, applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and rational mechanics. (Arago attributed to him the quote, "Life is good for only two things: doing mathematics and teaching it.")