Ignace-Gaston Pardies

Ignace-Gaston Pardies, who lived from 1636 to 1673, was a French Catholic Jesuit priest and scientist born in Pau. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1652, taught classical literature for a time and after his ordination taught philosophy and mathematics at the Collège de Clermont in Paris. His earliest scientific work, the Horologium Thaumanticum Duplex of 1662, described an instrument he had invented for constructing sundials, and he also wrote on comets and on statics. In his manuscript treatise on optics he followed the undulatory theory of light, and Christiaan Huygens noted that Pardies held the speed of light to be finite. He at first opposed Isaac Newton's theory of refraction but withdrew his objections after Newton's replies, which were printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. His Elémens de géométrie was translated into Latin, English and Manchu, and a star atlas of his appeared in 1674. He died of a fever caught while ministering to prisoners at Bicêtre near Paris.