Mydorge, Claude

, an able mathematician, was born at Paris in 1585, and was educated to the law. He became counsellor to the Chatelet, and afterwards treasurer of France in the generality of Amiens, but was too much attached to mathematical pursuits, and master of too ample a fortune, to pursue his profession as a source of emolument. He was the friend and acquaintance of Des Cartes, and entered into a vindication of him, in the dispute which he had with M. Fermat, and was afterwards a mediator of the peace which was made between those learned men in 1638. In the same year Mydorge published a Lutin treatise “On Conic Sections,” in four bt oks, which Meisenne has inserted in his “Abridgment of | Universal Geometry.” In 1642, he and Des Cartes received an invitation from sir Charles Cavendish to settle in England, which he declined, on the approach of the rebellion. He died at Paris in 1647, in the sixty-third year of his age. He was a practical mechanic, as well as an able mathematician, and spent more than a thousand crowns on the fabrication of glasses for telescopes, burning mirrors, mechanical engines, and mathematical instruments. ¹