Joseph Sauveur

Joseph Sauveur (1653 to 1716) was a French mathematician and physicist born in La Flèche, the son of a provincial notary. A hearing and speech impairment kept him mute until the age of seven, yet he received a fine education at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, discovered Euclid while studying in Paris and went on to teach mathematics to the pages of the Dauphine and to several princes, among them Eugene of Savoy. He worked on hydrostatics and on a waterworks project at Chantilly with Edmé Mariotte, wrote a manuscript on the elements of military fortification with Marshal Vauban, and in 1686 obtained the mathematics chair at the Collège de France, where he was allowed to read his inaugural lecture because he could not recite it from memory. Around 1694 he began working with the musician Étienne Loulié on the science of sound, which Fontenelle described as the discovery of an unknown country, and in 1696 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences.