Jacques Pelletier du Mans

Jacques Peletier, Jacques Peletier du Mans (* July 25, 1517 Le Mans, † July 1582 Paris), in Latinized form Jacobus Peletarius, was a French writer, humanist, lawyer, physician and mathematician. He stood with numerous writers and scholars of the era in contact and is now known as " billion" primarily as a mentor of the group of poets of La Pléiade, as well as the inventor of the number designations. Be unsuccessful remained his attempts to reform the French orthography in the sense that they should be more phonetic than follow etymological criteria, ie the words to write about as they were spoken.

Life and work

Peletier was the son of a lawyer Pierre Pelletier and his wife Jeanne le Royer of gebornenen from Le Mans. He studied philosophy at the Collège de Navarre in Paris and five years of law in Le Mans. In the 1530s he was secretary of the Bishop of Le Mans, but then turned from a career as a lawyer and studied self-taught Greek, medicine and mathematics. In 1541 he published a French translation of the Ars Poetica of Horace. In its effort to French literary language he pursued similar goals as the poets group Pléiade. In 1543 he became rector of the College de Bayeux in Paris, but in 1547 he gave up for a free existence on vacation, where he worked as a surgeon and teacher of mathematics. Except in Paris, he was in Bordeaux, Basel, Poitiers and Lyon. He published French books of poetry, in part, to Lucretius oriented scientific topics, mathematical works ( in French and Latin ) and smaller plants for medicine.

His edition of the first six books of the Elements of Euclid led to disputes with Christopher Clavius ​​and Johannes Buteo particular horn-shaped angle ( Book 3, Proposition 16 of the elements ) and the use of the superposition principle ( Axiom 4 in Book 1, What is coincides equal and Book 1, Proposition 4). He translated Gemma Frisius wrote a similar book about practical application of arithmetic and was influenced in his algebra of Gerolamo Cardano and Michael Stifel.

In 1572 he was briefly at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux. During this period he made ​​the acquaintance of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre de Brach. Already in 1579 he returned to Paris where he became Rector of the College of Le Mans.

Mathematical writings

• Arithmeticae practicae methodus facilis by Gemmam Frisium, huc accesserunt Peletarii Annotationes. Paris 1545 ( with subsequent editions from 1549 to 1557 ).
• L' en quatre livres arithmétique departie. Poitiers 1549 ( and other editions).
• L' algebre departie en deus livres. . Lyon 1545 3rd edition: 1620. Latin edition of De occulta parte numerorum. Paris 1560th

• Latin edition of the first six books of the elements with comments, in the 2nd edition also the Greek text of definitions and propositions.