Marin Mersenne, OM was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields.
27 Facts About Marin Mersenne
2.
Marin Mersenne is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those which can be written in the form for some integer.
3.
Marin Mersenne developed Mersenne's laws, which describe the harmonics of a vibrating string, and his seminal work on music theory, Harmonie universelle, for which he is referred to as the "father of acoustics".
4.
Marin Mersenne was a member of the Minim religious order and wrote and lectured on theology and philosophy.
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Marin Mersenne was born of Jeanne Mouliere, wife of Julien Marin Mersenne, peasants who lived near Oize, County of Maine.
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Marin Mersenne was educated at Le Mans and at the Jesuit College of La Fleche.
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Marin Mersenne corresponded with Giovanni Doni, Jacques Alexandre Le Tenneur, Constantijn Huygens, Galileo Galilei, and other scholars in Italy, England and the Dutch Republic.
8.
Marin Mersenne was a staunch defender of Galileo, assisting him in translations of some of his mechanical works.
9.
For four years, Marin Mersenne devoted himself entirely to philosophic and theological writing, and published Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim ; L'Impiete des deistes ; La Verite des sciences.
10.
Marin Mersenne was educated by Jesuits, but he never joined the Society of Jesus.
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Marin Mersenne taught theology and philosophy at Nevers and Paris.
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Marin Mersenne was not afraid to cause disputes among his learned friends in order to compare their views, notable among which were disputes between Descartes and Pierre de Fermat and Jean de Beaugrand.
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Marin Mersenne visited Italy fifteen times, in 1640,1641 and 1645.
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Marin Mersenne condemns astral magic and astrology and the anima mundi, a concept popular amongst Renaissance neo-platonists.
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Marin Mersenne criticises Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, Francesco Giorgio and Robert Fludd, his main target.
16.
The anonymous Summum bonum, another critique of Marin Mersenne, is a Rosicrucian-themed text.
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Marin Mersenne is remembered today thanks to his association with the Marin Mersenne primes.
18.
The Marin Mersenne Twister, named for Marin Mersenne primes, is frequently used in computer engineering and in related fields such as cryptography.
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However, Marin Mersenne was not primarily a mathematician; he wrote about music theory and other subjects.
20.
Marin Mersenne edited works of Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, and other Greek mathematicians.
21.
At a time when the scientific journal had not yet come into being, Marin Mersenne was the centre of a network for exchange of information.
22.
Marin Mersenne submitted to various eminent Parisian thinkers a manuscript copy of the Meditations on First Philosophy, and defended its orthodoxy against numerous clerical critics.
23.
Marin Mersenne performed extensive experiments to determine the acceleration of falling objects by comparing them with the swing of pendulums, reported in his Cogitata Physico-Mathematica in 1644.
24.
Marin Mersenne was the first to measure the length of the seconds pendulum, that is a pendulum whose swing takes one second, and the first to observe that a pendulum's swings are not isochronous as Galileo thought, but that large swings take longer than small swings.
25.
Marin Mersenne led the fight against acceptance of these ideas, particularly those of Rosicrucian promoter Robert Fludd, who had a lifelong battle of words with Johannes Kepler.
26.
Marin Mersenne had been a regular correspondent with Galileo and had extended the work on vibrating strings originally developed by his father, Vincenzo Galilei.
27.
An air attributed to Marin Mersenne was used by Ottorino Respighi in his second suite of Ancient Airs and Dances.