Pierre Bouguer

Pierre Bouguer, born at Le Croisic in Brittany in 1698, was a French mathematician, geophysicist, geodesist and astronomer, also known as the father of naval architecture. At the age of 16 he succeeded his late father as professor of hydrography at Le Croisic. In 1729 he published his Essai d'optique on the gradation of light, which defines the light lost in passing through the atmosphere, and he became the first known discoverer of what is now called the Beer-Lambert law; he made the first numerical photometric measurement and invented a heliometer. In 1735 he sailed with Charles Marie de La Condamine to the Viceroyalty of Peru to measure the length of a degree of latitude near the equator, work that took ten years and was reported in La figure de la terre. His 1746 Traité du navire was the first treatise of naval architecture and first explained the metacenter as a measure of ship stability. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1750 and died in Paris in 1758.