Nicolas Fatio de Duillier - Life

Life

Fatio was born in 1664 as the seventh of fourteen children of Jean-Baptiste and Cathérine Fatio in Basel, Switzerland. The family moved in 1672 to Duillier. In 1682 at the age of 18 Fatio travelled to Paris to perform astronomical studies under the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini at the Parisian observatory. In 1686, Fatio by chance became a witness to a conspiracy aimed at William of Orange, which he helped to foil. In the same year he made the acquaintance of Jakob Bernoulli and Christiaan Huygens, with whom a particularly close cooperation was developed. The main content of their work was the calculus. In 1687 he traveled to London and made the acquaintance of John Wallis and Edward Bernard (1638-1697) and worked out a solution of the inverse tangent problem. He also was on friendly terms with Gilbert Burnet, John Locke, Richard Hampden and his son John Hampden. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1688 on the recommendation of John Hoskyns.

He had a relationship with Isaac Newton, and from the beginning he was impressed by Newton's gravitational theory. In 1691, he planned to prepare a new edition of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, but never finished it. (One of Newton's biographers claimed that the relationship may have been romantic, though this is apparently based on subjective interpretations of incomplete letters.) In 1694, their relationship diminished. At this time, several letter exchanges with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also took place.

In 1707, Fatio came under the influence of a fanatical religious sect, the Camisards, which ruined Fatio's reputation. He left England and took part in pilgrim journeys across Europe. After his return only a few scientific documents by him appeared. He died in 1753 near Worcester, England. After his death his Geneva compatriot Georges-Louis Le Sage tried to purchase the scientific papers of Fatio. These papers together with Le Sage's are now in the Library of the University of Geneva.