Joseph Privat de Molières

Joseph Privat de Molières was a French physicist and mathematician, born in Tarascon in Provence on 26 May 1676 and dead in Paris on 12 May 1742. He was a member of the Académie des sciences and a professor at the Collège royal. His Leçons de mathématique, drawn up in 1725 for the physics taught at the Collège royal, were followed by the four volumes of his Leçons de physique of 1734 to 1739, which explained physics by the laws of mechanics, and by a Traité synthétique des lignes du premier et du second genre of 1740, elements of geometry built on the straight line, circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola. He defended the Cartesian system of vortices, writing memoirs for the Academy on the laws of motion in a spherical vortex, on the celestial vortices and on the resistance of the ether to moving bodies, and a posthumous dissertation on the central force in a spherical vortex was printed in 1743.