Jacques Rohault

Jacques Rohault was a French philosopher, physicist and mathematician and a follower of Cartesianism, born at Amiens in 1618, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and dying in Paris on 27 December 1672. Raised on conventional scholastic philosophy, he adopted and popularised the new Cartesian physics, and his Wednesday lectures in Paris, begun in the 1650s, became celebrated and drew Pierre-Sylvain Régis among others. He held to the mechanical philosophy and gave qualified support to its corpuscular form. His Traité de physique, published in Paris in 1671, became a standard textbook for half a century, separating physics from metaphysics after the precedent of Henricus Regius and including Christiaan Huygens's theory of gravitation. Samuel Clarke's Latin translation with annotations that corrected it by the theories of Isaac Newton gained numerous editions of its own.