Pierre Bouguer (French:[buˈge]) (16 February 1698,Le Croisic,Province of Brittany – 15 August 1758, Paris) was a Frenchmathematician,geophysicist,geodesist, andastronomer. He is also known as "the father ofnaval architecture".[citation needed]
Bouguer's father,Jean Bouguer, one of the besthydrographers of his time, wasRegius Professor ofhydrography atLe Croisic in lowerBrittany, and author of a treatise onnavigation. He taught his sons Pierre and Jan at their home, where he also taught private students. In 1714, at the age of 16, Pierre was appointed to succeed his deceased father as professor of hydrography. In 1727 he gained the prize given by theFrench Academy of Sciences for his paperOn the masting of ships, beatingLeonhard Euler; and two other prizes, one for his dissertationOn the best method of observing the altitude of stars at sea, the other for his paperOn the best method of observing the variation of the compass at sea.[1] These were published in the Prix de l'Académie des Sciences.
In 1729 he publishedEssai d'optique sur la gradation de la lumière, the object of which is to define the quantity of light lost by passing through a given extent of theatmosphere, and became the first known discoverer of what is now more commonly known as theBeer-Lambert law.[2] He found the light of thesun to be 300,000 times more intense than that of themoon, and thus made some of the earliest measurements inphotometry. In 1730 he was made professor of hydrography atLe Havre, and succeededPierre Louis Maupertuis as associate geometer of the Academy of Sciences. He also invented aheliometer, afterwards perfected byJoseph von Fraunhofer. He was afterwards promoted in the Academy to the place of Maupertuis, and went to reside in Paris.
Bouguer's Mémoire presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1734 and published in 1736 was the first treatise on the theory of dome.
In 1735 Bouguer sailed withCharles Marie de La Condamine on ascientific mission toPeru, tomeasure thelength of a degree of latitude in themeridian arc near theequator. Ten years were spent in this operation, a full account of which was published by Bouguer in 1749,La figure de la terre (French for "thefigure of the earth").[3]
In 1746 he published the first treatise of naval architecture,Traité du navire, which among other achievements first explained the use of themetacenter as a measure of ships' stability. His later writings were nearly all upon the theory of navigation and naval architecture.
In January 1750 he was elected aFellow of the Royal Society.[4]
Acrater onMars was named in his honour.[5] Alunar crater andan asteroid were also named after him.
His name is also recalled as the meteorological termBouguer's halo (also known asUlloa's halo, afterAntonio de Ulloa, a Spanish member of his South American expedition) which an observer may see infrequently in fog when sun breaks through (for example, on a mountain) and looks down-sun – effectively a "fog bow" (as opposed to a "rain-bow"). It is "An infrequently observed meteorological phenomenon; a faint white,circular arc or complete ring of light that has a radius of 39 degrees and is centred on the antisolar point. When observed, it is usually in the form of a separate outer ring around an anticorona."[6]
The termBouguer anomaly, referring to small regional variations in the Earth's gravity field resulting from density variations in underlying rocks, is named after him.
A large bronze statue of him stands at the port in Le Croisic;[7]seeWorks by Jean Fréour.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bouguer, Pierre".Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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