Antoine Deparcieux

Antoine Deparcieux (28 October 1703 to 2 September 1768) was a French mathematician, born at Clessous in the province of Languedoc. He spent ten years at the school of Saint Florent while working on his family farm, studied at a Jesuit school in Lyon from 1725 and went to Paris in 1730 to deepen his mathematics and physics, earning a living by making sundials. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1746, was named Censeur Royal around 1765 and was also librarian at the University of Strasbourg. His constructions included a machine to raise water at Crécy castle, a pump for the castle of Arnouville and a tobacco press. His publications include treatises on trigonometry in 1738 and 1740, one on gnomonics in 1741, and the 1746 Essai sur les probabilités de la durée de la vie humaine, the work for which he is best known.