Jacques Pelletier du Mans

Jacques Pelletier du Mans (1517 to 1582), also spelled Peletier, was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance. Born in Le Mans, he studied at the College de Navarre in Paris, then law and medicine, and published scientific and mathematical treatises alongside his poetry. His first poems of 1547 included early work by Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, and he later wrote the Art poetique francais. He tried to reform French spelling on phonetic lines in a 1550 dialogue on orthography and used his own system in his later books. In his last years he published Latin works on algebra, geometry, arithmetic and medicine, including a refutation of Galen, and he promoted the word milliard for a thousand millions, a naming convention still used in countries of the long scale.