Mariotte, Edme

Mariotte, Edme (ĕd`mə märyôt`), 1620?–1684, French physicist. His De la nature de l'air (1676) includes a statement of Boyle's law (see gas laws), which he discovered independently and which is sometimes called Mariotte's law in France. One of the founders of experimental physics, Mariotte investigated a wide range of phenomena, including the motion of bodies, sound, hydrodynamics, barometry, color, and vision.

---

Mariotte, Edme 

Born 1620 (?), in Dijon; died May 12, 1684, in Paris. French physicist, member of the Paris Academy of Sciences from its founding (1666).

Mariotte was prior of a monastery near Dijon. He first described the blind spot in the eye (1668), and in 1676 he conducted experiments on the dependence of the elasticity of air on pressure and was the second to give a formulation of the law that had been discovered and published by R. Boyle in 1662. He was the first to use this law to determine the altitude of a point by barometric readings. He described numerous experiments on the flow of liquids through pipes and the operation of wells (1686). Mariotte also studied the phenomenon of the collision of bodies.