Claude Dechales

Claude François Milliet Dechales was a French Jesuit priest and mathematician, born at Chambéry in Savoy in 1621 and dead at Turin on 28 March 1678. The son of the first president of the Sovereign Senate of Savoy, he entered the Jesuits in 1636, joined the French Jesuit mission to the Ottoman Empire and taught literature for nine years. Louis XIV had him appointed professor of hydrography at Marseille, where he taught navigation and military engineering, and from 1674 he taught philosophy, mathematics and theology at the Trinity College in Lyon, where he published his Cursus seu Mundus Mathematicus. His Huict livres des Elemens d'Euclide of 1660 to 1672 and a Latin second edition of 1674 made Euclid easier to read, and an English version appeared in 1685. He also wrote on fortification, navigation and the laws of motion, and at the end of his life he taught mathematics at a college in Turin.