Honoré Fabri

Honoré Fabri, who lived from about 1607 or 1608 to 1688, was a French Jesuit theologian, mathematician, physicist and controversialist, known in Latin as Honoratus Fabrius and also as Coningius. Sources differ on his birth, some giving 5 April 1607 at Virieu-le-Grand and others 8 April 1608 at Le Grand Abergement. He entered the Society of Jesus at Avignon in 1626, taught philosophy for eight years and mathematics for six at the Jesuit college in Lyon, and was then called to Rome as one of the confessors at St. Peter's Basilica, where he stayed until 1680. Elected to the Accademia del Cimento in 1657, he was ranked by Leibniz with Galileo, Torricelli, Steno and Borelli for his work on elasticity and the theory of vibrations, and his Dialogi physici of 1669 described Grimaldi's experiments on diffraction, from which Newton by his own admission learned of the effect. He died in Rome in 1688.