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University of St Andrews, Scotland
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Le_Tenneur.html
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Little is known of Jacques Le Tenneur (even the dates given for his birth and death are uncertain) except that he was a friend of Mersenne and that he corresponded with Gassendi.
It is thought that he spent the first 30 or so years of his life in Paris where he was almost certainly educated. It is known for certain that by 1646 he was in Clermont in the Auvergne region of central France. Clermont was the town that Pascal was born in 23 years before.
In 1651 he was counsellor to the provincial senate of Guyenne. At this time the Fronde, a civil war in France, was taking place and 1651 is the year Louis XIV lifted the siege of Cognac and assured the obedience of Guyenne. It is highly likely that Le Tenneur was involved with the political feuding of the Fronde.
Le Tenneur's most important work De motu naturaliter accelerato was published in 1649 where he showed that he understood Galileo's arguments for free falling objects while Fabri and others did not. Most people at that time believed that the speed of a body in free fall was proportional to the distance it had fallen.
Le Tenneur also published Traité des quantités incommensurables which is a work on the foundations of algebra. He clearly was trying to argue against the notions current at the time on using algebra to study geometry. He wished geometry to be Greek style, not in the style of Descartes and his followers.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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