Catholic mathematician and one of the founders of modern science, born Caen, Normandy, c.1323;died Lisieux, France, July 11, 1382. Bishop of Lisieux in 1377. Initiated the foundations of analytical geometry. Though his Christological treatise De communicatione idiomatum was commonly used at Paris in the 15th century, Oresme is best known as an economist, mathematician, and physicist. He forestalled Descartes in employing analytical geometry, and anticipated Galileo's law of the space traversed in case of uniformly varied motion. His theory of weight was substituted for the Aristotelean by Copernicus and Giordano Bruno; and he again triumphed by demonstrating the diurnal motion of the earth more explicitly and clearly than Copernicus. Wrote a valuable treatise exposing the falsity of the conception of astrology as a science.
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