Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eugène Burnouf was a French Indologist and orientalist born in Paris on the 8th of April 1801, who died on the 28th of May 1852. He is known for foundational contributions to the study of Buddhism in Europe, the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform, and translations of major Sanskrit and Buddhist texts including the Bhagavata Purana and the Lotus Sutra. Jonathan Silk has called him the founding father of modern Buddhist scientific studies.
In 1836, Burnouf identified that one of the cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. Using that discovery, he published an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which he correctly deciphered. His work, alongside that of Christian Lassen, reached Henry Rawlinson before his Memoir was published and prompted significant revisions to that work.
Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme indien was published in 1844 and is recognized as a foundational text on Buddhist metaphysics. It influenced many French occultists in the nineteenth century for whom Indian philosophy and Sanskrit texts were a source of inspiration. A second edition appeared in 1876, prefaced by a notice of Burnouf's works by Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire.
Burnouf translated the Bhagavata Purana, the Hindu text centered on Krishna, in three folio volumes published between 1840 and 1847. He also translated the Lotus Sutra, published as Le Lotus de la bonne loi in 1852 by the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris. Many of his Sanskrit texts were supplied by Indologist and anthropologist Brian Houghton Hodgson.
Burnouf worked on manuscripts of the Avesta brought to France by Anquetil-Duperron and is credited with first bringing knowledge of the Avestan language into European scholarship. He had the Vendidad Sade lithographed from the manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale and published it in folio parts from 1829 to 1843. He also published his Commentaire sur le Yacna between 1833 and 1835.
Eugène Burnouf's father was Professor Jean-Louis Burnouf (1775-1844), a classical scholar noted for an excellent six-volume translation of Tacitus published between 1827 and 1833. Jean-Louis was Eugène's scholarly model, though Eugène extended his reach into Sanskrit, Avestan, Buddhist studies, and Persian cuneiform rather than remaining in the classical tradition.