Marin Mersenne
- For the primes named after Marin Mersenne, see Mersenne prime.
Marin Mersenne, Marin Mersennus or le Père Mersenne (September 8, 1588 – September 1, 1648) was a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist.
Life
Marin Mersenne was born of near Oizé, Maine (present day Sarthe) on September 8, 1588. It appears that his family was of quite modest means, and it is likely that Mersenne received external financial support during the course of his studies. He began his education at the Collège du Mans, and continued at the Jesuit College of La Flèche, where he was a schoolmate of René Descartes (their friendship began later). In 1609, he moved to Paris in order to study theology at the Sorbonne, and was ordained in 1613. Two years prior to that, Mersenne joined the Order of the Minims, eventually taking up residence in their convent in Paris. It appears that the Minims allowed Mersenne substantial freedom to pursue his academic interests, and the convent remained his primary residence for the rest of his life.
Mersenne's early philosophical work is characterized by orthodox conservativism. He published an attack on Copernican astronomy on 1623, and initially accepted much of traditional scholastic philosophy. By the 1630s, however, he had accepted Galileo's ideas and the mechanical natural philosophy of Descartes. This development in his thinking corresponded to his taking up the role of a communicator of ideas. At the time, neither academic journals nor scientific academies had formed, and the established centers of education (Paris, Oxford) were still resistant to the new philosophies and sciences which were surfacing across Europe. These facts made it quite difficult for the new intellectuals to communicate with one another. Mersenne had a gift for correspondence, as well as a gift for communicating ideas other than his own. He therefore became roughly the equivalent of a journal himself, writing to and reporting the ideas of such people as Thomas Hobbes in England, the astronomer Hevelius in Danzig, Galileo in Italy and Descartes in the Netherlands. In addition, he was active in helping bring various works to publication (including Hobbes' De Cive, Galileo's Two Chief World Systems and Descartes' Discourse on Method), and personally hosted meetings of scientists and philosophers in his cell. When Descartes had composed his Meditations on First Philosophy, he turned to Mersenne to distribute the work and collect objections. The objections Mersenne gathered (by Arnauld, Hobbes, Mersenne himself, and others) formed the basis for the Objections and Replies that was attached to the Meditations when the latter was published.
In 1648, Mersenne died through complications arising from a lung abscess.
Work
Mersenne's chief contribution to the development of Western thought may have been his role as a facilitator for others, yet he developed a fairly sophistical philosophical view of his own, and made significant contributions to both mathematics and music.
Philosophy
Mersenne's mature philosophical thought centered around attacks on Pyrrhonist skepticism, which had regained popularity in the early 17th century. While Mersenne agreed that human knowledge was inevitably limited, he worries that more radical forms of skepticism threatened to undermine faith and marginalize the new scientific developments.
Mathematics and Music
Mersenne is remembered today thanks to his association with the Mersenne primes. However, he was not primarily a mathematician; he wrote about music theory and other subjects. He edited works of Euclid, Archimedes, and other Greek mathematicians. But his perhaps most important contribution to the advance of learning was his extensive correspondence (in Latin, of course) with mathematicians and other scientists in many countries. At a time when the scientific journal had not yet come into being, Mersenne was the center of a network for exchange of information.
His philosophical works are characterized by wide scholarship and the narrowest theological orthodoxy. His greatest service to philosophy was his enthusiastic defence of Descartes, whose agent he was in Paris and whom he visited in exile in the Netherlands. He submitted to various eminent Parisian thinkers a manuscript copy of the Meditations, and defended its orthodoxy against numerous clerical critics. In later life, he gave up speculative thought and turned to scientific research, especially in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Of his works in this connection the best known is L'Harmonie universelle (1636) dealing with the theory of music and musical instruments.
One of his major contributions to musical tuning theory was the suggestion of as the ratio for a semitone. It was more accurate (0.44 cents sharp) than Vincenzo Galilei's 18/17 (1.05 cents flat), and could be constructed with straightedge and compass. Mersenne's description in the 1636 Harmonie universelle of the first absolute determination of the frequency of an audible tone (at 84 Hz) implies that he had already demonstrated that the absolute-frequency ratio of two vibrating strings, radiating a musical tone and its octave, is as 1 : 2. The perceived harmony (consonance) of two such notes would be explained if the ratio of the air oscillation frequencies is also 1 : 2, which in turn is consistent with the source-air-motion-frequency-equivalence hypothesis.
His Traité de l'harmonie universelle (1627) is regarded as a source of information on 17th century music, especially French music and musicians, to rival even the works of Pietro Cerone.
Bibliography
Works by Mersenne
- Euclidis elementorum libri, etc. (Paris, 1626)
- Les Mécaniques de Galilée (Paris, 1634)
- Questions inouies ou recreations des savants (1634)
- Questions théologiques, physiques, etc. (1634)
- Nouvelles découvertes de Galilée (1639)
- Cogitata physico-mathematica (1644)
- Universae geometriae synopsis (1644)
Works about Mersenne
- Adrien Baillet, Vie de Descartes (1691)
- Poté, Éloge de Mersenne (1816)
- Gehring, F. (1922) "Mersennus, Marin (le Père Mersenne)", Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. J.A. Fuller Maitland)
External links
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson. Marin Mersenne at the MacTutor archive
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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