Louis-Bertrand Castel
Louis-Bertrand Castel (born November 15, 1688 in Montpellier , † January 11, 1757 in Paris ) was a French Jesuit and mathematician .
Life
Castel was born the son of a doctor in Montpellier. He attended the Jesuit school in Toulouse , entered the order in 1703, where he studied ancient languages, mathematics and philosophy . At first he taught at the colleges of the Jesuits in Toulouse, Clermont , Aubenas , Pamiers and Cahors . His request to go to China as a missionary was rejected, instead Father Tournemine appointed him to teach at the renowned Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1720 . From 1720 to 1745 he was one of the editors of the Journal de Trévoux , the scientific body of the Jesuits. After he had published several treatises on mathematics and physics, which made him known in the learned circles of Europe, he was admitted to the Royal Society in London in 1730, in 1746 in the Académie de Bordeaux , and in 1748 in the Académie de Rouen and in the Société royale in Lyon.
In questions of mechanics he was a follower of Cartesianism , the laws of nature should be rationally deducible for him. He attributed Isaac Newton's insistence on the primacy of observation to an atheistic materialism and tried to refute Newtonian mechanics with the help of sometimes absurd distortions of his evidence. This made him briefly one of the most prominent opponents of the Newtonian system. Finally, Hegel seems to have relied on Castel in his erroneous criticism of Newtonian mechanics.
Castel was best known for his theory of colors , L'Optique des couleurs (1740, German translation 1747), in which he (among other things) recommended a twelve-part color circle as a color model (in opposition to Newton), and also for his theory from 1725 developed eye piano or color piano that combined optical and acoustic effects. He assigned a color to each note of the chromatic scale :
- Do = blue; Do # = light green; Ré = green; Ré # = olive; Mi = yellow; Fa = fauve; Fa # = incarnate; Sol = red; Sol # = pink; La = violet; La # = agate (brown); Si = gray; Do = blue.
Appropriate instruments were only built towards the end of his life. Diderot , who valued Castel, reports in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets ( Letter on the deaf and dumb , 1751) of the demonstration of such an instrument.
Fonts
- Traité de physique sur la pesanteur universelle des corps . 1724.
- Mathématique universelle . 1728.
- L'Optique des couleurs . 1740.
- Le vrai système de physique générale de M. Isaac Newton, exposé et analyze en parallele avec celui de Descartes . 1743
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Louis-Bertrand Castel. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Maarten Franssen: The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel . In: Tractrix: Yearbook for the History of Science, Medicine, Technology and Mathematics , 3, 1991 (English).
- Eye piano
Individual evidence
- ^ Cinzia Ferrini: On Newton's demonstration of Kepler's second law in Hegel's De Orbitis Planetarum (1801). In: Philosophia naturalis . 31.1, 1994, pp. 150-170.
- ↑ On Castel's color theories and nomenclature and their reception in Germany, see William Jervis Jones, German Color Terms, A Study in their Evolution from Earliest Times to the Present , John Benjamin, Amsterdam 2013, Section 2.7.2.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Castel, Louis-Bertrand |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French Cartesian, opponent of the Newtonian system |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 15, 1688 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Montpellier |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 11, 1757 |
| Place of death | Paris |