Nicholas Oresme c. 1320 – 1382

Nicholas Oresme was a French scholastic philosopher, mathematician, economist, theologian, and bishop of Lisieux, and one of the most original thinkers of the fourteenth century. Trained at the University of Paris and a long-time master of the College of Navarre, he advised King Charles V and translated Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, On the Heavens, and On the Soul into French, coining a wide vocabulary of philosophical terms that survives in modern French. His mathematical work introduced the graphical representation of variable quantities and anticipated key elements of analytic geometry, while his De Configurationibus and De Caelo et Mundo discussed the rotation of the Earth as a mathematically reasonable hypothesis.

Nicholas Oresme was born around 1320 in the diocese of Bayeux, Normandy, of obscure peasant origins. He studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where he became master of arts before 1348 and master of theology by 1356, and in the same year was appointed Grand Master of Navarre. He served as counsellor and translator to the future Charles V, became canon and dean of Rouen, and in 1377 was promoted by the king to the bishopric of Lisieux.

His Latin treatises include the De configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, De proportionibus proportionum, Ad pauca respicientes, the Questiones super geometriam Euclidis, the De moneta on currency, and a sceptical Tractatus contra astronomos judiciarios against judicial astrology. At Charles V's command he translated Aristotle's Ethics, Politics, Economics, and On the Heavens into Old French, producing the encyclopaedic Le livre du ciel et du monde (1377), a foundational text of French scientific prose.

Oresme anticipated key features of seventeenth-century physics: he gave a graphical representation of the latitude of forms that prefigures the coordinate plane, proved a version of the mean-speed theorem for uniformly accelerated motion, and argued that the apparent motion of the heavens could be saved equally well by a daily rotation of the Earth, although he ultimately rejected the hypothesis on scriptural grounds. He died at Lisieux in July 1382.