Marin Mersenne

Marin Mersenne, who lived from 8 September 1588 to 1 September 1648, was a French polymath, an ordained Catholic priest and a member of the Minim religious order. He was born near Oizé in the County of Maine and educated at Le Mans and at the Jesuit College of La Flèche, though he never joined the Jesuits. Mathematicians know him best for the Mersenne primes, numbers of the form 2 to the power n minus 1, and he also formulated Mersenne laws for the harmonics of a vibrating string and wrote the music theory work Harmonie universelle, which earned him the title father of acoustics. Through his wide correspondence he became a hub of the scientific world of the early seventeenth century, called the post-box of Europe, and in 1635 he set up the informal Académie Parisienne, a precursor of the Académie des sciences.