Emmanuel Maignan

Emmanuel Maignan, who lived from 1601 to 1676, was a French physicist and Catholic theologian of the Order of Minims, born and died at Toulouse. The son of the dean of the Chancery of Toulouse, he studied the humanities at the Jesuit college and joined the Minims at eighteen. He opposed the Aristotelian teaching of his instructors, especially in physics, preferred Plato, and mastered the mathematics of his day almost without help. In 1636 he was called to Rome to teach mathematics at the convent of Trinità dei Monti, where he spent fourteen years in mathematics and physical experiments and published Perspectiva horaria, a four volume work on gnomonics and perspective, in 1648. Back in Toulouse he became provincial, wrote the Cursus philosophicus of 1652, and declined an invitation to Paris from Louis XIV.