AUGUSTIN-JEAN FRESNEL- Biography

AUGUSTIN-JEAN FRESNEL

Birth: 10h May 1788/ Death: 14h July 1827

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French Physicist who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally.

Fresnel was the son of an architect, born at Broglie (Eure). His early progress in learning was slow, and he still could not read when he was eight years old. At thirteen he entered the Ecole Centrale in Caen, and at sixteen and a half the Ecole Polytechnique, where he acquitted himself with

distinction. From there he went to the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees.

He served as an engineer successively in the departments of Vendee, Drome and Ille-et-Vilaine. However, having supported the Bourbons in 1814 he lost his appointment on Napoleon's return to power. On the second restoration of the monarchy, he obtained a post as engineer in Paris, where much of his life from that time was spent. His researches in optics, continued until his death, appear to have begun about the year 1814, when he prepared a paper on the aberration of light, which however, was not published.

In 1818 he wrote a memoir on diffraction for which in the ensuing year he received the prize of the Académie des Sciences at Paris. He was in 1823 unanimously elected a member of the academy, and in 1825 he became a member of the Royal Society of London, which in 1827, at the time of his last illness, awarded him the Rumford Medal. In 1819 he was nominated a commissioner of lighthouses, for which he was the first to construct a special type of lens, now

called a Fresnel lens, as substitutes for mirrors. Fresnel died of tuberculosis at Ville-d' Avray, near Paris.