Ismaël Bullialdus

Ismaël Boulliau was a 17th-century French astronomer, mathematician, and Catholic priest, who was also interested in history, theology, classical studies, and philology. He was an active member of the Republic of Letters, an intellectual community that exchanged ideas. An early defender of the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, Ismael Bullialdus has been called "the most noted astronomer of his generation" whose renown is perhaps best exemplified by the claim of 1979 Nobel laureate in Physics Steven Weinberg that in 1640 Bullialdus made "the first suggestion of an inverse-square law." One of his books is Astronomia Philolaica (1645).