Pierre Bouguer

Pierre Bouguer was a French mathematician, geophysicist, geodesist and astronomer, born at Le Croisic in Brittany on 16 February 1698 and dead in Paris on 15 August 1758, also called the father of naval architecture. Taught at home by his father Jean Bouguer, a hydrographer, he succeeded him as professor of hydrography at sixteen. In 1727 he won the prize of the Academy of Sciences for his paper on the masting of ships, ahead of Euler, and in 1729 published his Essai d'optique sur la gradation de la lumière, making some of the earliest photometric measurements and becoming the first known discoverer of the Beer-Lambert law. He became associate geometer of the Academy in 1730, invented a heliometer, and from 1735 spent ten years with La Condamine in the Viceroyalty of Peru measuring a degree of latitude near the equator, reported in La figure de la terre of 1749. His Traité du navire of 1746 first explained the metacenter as a measure of a ship's stability. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1750, and the Bouguer anomaly in gravity is named after him.