Marin Mersenne

Marin Mersenne (born Sept. 8, 1588, near Oizé, Maine, France—died Sept. 1, 1648, Paris) was a French theologian, natural philosopher, and mathematician. While best remembered by mathematicians for his search for a formula to generate prime numbers based on what are now known as “Mersenne numbers,” his wider significance stems from his role as correspondent, publicizing and disseminating the work of some of the greatest thinkers of his age.

Mersenne was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche soon after its founding in 1604. He left La Flèche about 1609 to study theology in Paris at both the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. In 1611 he entered the austere Roman Catholic Order of Minims, spending his novitiate at Nigeon and Meaux. From 1614 to 1618 he taught philosophy and theology at Nevers. He resided in Paris, except for frequent trips abroad, from 1619 until his death in 1648.

Mersenne’s earliest publications, such as Quaestiones celeberrime in Genesim (1623; “Frequent Questions Concerning Genesis”) and La vérité des sciences (1625; “The Truth of Science”), defended orthodox theology by distinguishing between the ultimate nature, or essence, of things (knowable only by God) and the contingent facts observable by man. He disagreed, however, with the views of skepticism that the world is completely unknowable. He asserted that knowledge should freely advance through experiment and observation—frequently chiding scholars for not including accurate experimental data in their papers—while insisting that hypotheses are, at best, probable explanations. He also distinguished between a rational, indeed mechanistic, natural world populated by living automatons and a sentient humanity. From 1626 Mersenne’s publications concentrated on applied mathematical sciences, such as astronomy and optics.

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Philosophy 101

In 1635 Mersenne formed the informal, private Académie Parisienne (the precursor to the French Academy of Sciences), where many of the leading mathematicians and natural philosophers of France shared their research. He used this forum to disseminate the ideas of René Descartes, who had moved to the Netherlands in 1629. He also assisted in the publication of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637; “Discourse on Method”) and took charge of soliciting the “Objections” appended to Descartes’s Meditationes (1641; “Meditations”). Other luminaries that Mersenne corresponded with, promulgated the ideas of, and mediated disputes among include Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, and Pierre de Fermat. During the 1630s Mersenne was particularly important in promoting the work of Galileo. Through two small books and discussions of Galileo’s work in his correspondence, Mersenne disseminated Galileo’s ideas beyond Italy and greatly facilitated the acceptance of mechanical explanations against remnants of scholasticism.

In 1644 Mersenne communicated some research of his on numbers of the form 2ⁿ−1, now known as Mersenne numbers. He observed that if 2ⁿ−1 is prime, then n must be prime, but that the converse is not necessarily true. Although he failed to find a formula for primes (it is not certain that one even exists), Mersenne numbers continue to interest mathematicians, and his formula is still useful in testing large numbers to determine if they are prime.

Mersenne made several lengthy trips to the Netherlands, provincial France, and Italy. From the latter excursion he brought back news to France in 1645 of the barometric experiment of Evangelista Torricelli, which led to the famous work of Pascal on the weight of the air.