Nicolaas Hartsoeker
Nicolas Hartsoeker ( born March 26, 1656 in Gouda, † December 10, 1725 in Utrecht ) was a Dutch biologist, a mathematician and physicist.
Life
He was probably born on March 26, 1656 in Gouda in the Netherlands, the son of the preacher Christiaan Hartsoeker (* 1684) and van der Mey Annetie and business in his youth self-study in the natural sciences. From 1674 he studied medicine in Leiden, in 1676 he went to Rotterdam, a year later to Amsterdam. 1680 he married Elisabeth Vettekeucken, with whom he had a son ( Christian, * 1684). From 1684-1696 he lived in Paris, where he excelled as a builder of optical instruments (including the eponymous Hartsoeker microscope ) and in 1694 his first work, " Essai de Dioptrique " is published. In Paris he was made as a student of Christiaan Huygens familiar with the scientific community in France. In the context of embryology, he was also with the theory of preformation; He coined a famous Homunculus representation of the sperm. In 1696 he returned to Rotterdam and became the following year mathematics teacher of Tsar Peter the Great in Amsterdam. However, its proposal to follow him to Russia and to become a professor of physics at St. Petersburg, he refused. Hartsoeker 1703 top mathematician at the court of Elector Johann Wilhelm von der Pfalz in Dusseldorf, where he lived until 1716, before he returned to the Netherlands. On December 10, 1725 he died in Utrecht.
Quote
I believe that no man of sound mind ever seriously has to be persuaded that the visible world was formed by the chance meeting of an infinite number of atoms, without the provision of an almighty being the same would put in their present order. It would be this much incomprehensible, as if all the letters which occur in the Aeneid of Virgil, randomly jumbled, would have ordered such that the seals would come in the shape composed by the poet to the fore ( principles of physics, c.3)
Writings
- Essai de Dioptrique, 1694
- Principes de physique, 1696
- Traité de physique, 1696