Gilles de Roberval

Gilles Personne de Roberval ( born August 10, 1602 Roberval, Senlis, † October 27th 1675 in Paris) was a French mathematician.

Roberval developed independently by Evangelista Torricelli, a method for the determination of tangents to curves and Bonaventura Cavalieri independently of a indivisibles method ( Cavalieri'sche principle) for the determination of volumes and surfaces. He later accused both of plagiarism.

Life

Roberval was born with the name Gilles Personne Roberval (north of Paris, today Senlis ), later he called himself Gilles Personne de Roberval, which he also gave the impression of being noble. He came from a simple peasant family, but could go to school. Through this classroom, and probably to a great extent by his autodidactic studies he was able to travel about as a teacher in France. During this period, he deepened his knowledge by further autodidactic studies.

He then traveled to Paris and met the mathematical group to Marin Mersenne. In 1632 he became professor of philosophy at the Collège Gervais. 1634 he was appointed Professor Ramus ' at the Collège de France ( in Paris), to which he had to neubewerben rotational basis.

Since its inception in 1666 he was a member of the Académie des Sciences. There he led his 1669 Roberval balance, a special beam balance before. This ensured a parallelogram linkage, that there is always a balance, irrespective of the position of the weights on the two scales. The construction principle is still used today.

Roberval used a special tactic for the appointments to professorships. So he did not publish his findings, but they only presented the Nominating Committees; these tactics earned him numerous armed, as other mathematicians published their methods. Roberval, who did not publish his methods, accused the scientists (such as the already mentioned Cavalieri and Torricelli ), they would have stolen the idea from him. In the cases Cavalieri and Torricelli you can say, however, that they developed their methods independent of Roberval.

Overall, Roberval was very hot-headed, short-tempered and jealous. He never missed an opportunity to compete with others; in particular with Descartes, he led (by letter contact via Mersenne ) disputes, some of which contained personal insults.

The Chair Ramus ' he held until his death.

Roberval also published a work on the Copernican world view, which, however, he published under the name of an ancient Greek astronomer ( Aristarchus ).