Early Life and Education
He was born at Vire, Normandy (now in the department of Calvados), the son of Vire lawyer Nicolas Du Hamel. The family also included two other brothers, Georges, who would become a lawyer like his father and go onto great success as a member of the Grand Conseil in Paris, and Guillaume, who became a priest and served in the court of the King of France. He began his formal studies at Caen, moving to Paris in 1642. Du Hamel demonstrated an early aptitude for scholarly work, and at the age of eighteen published an explanation of the work of Theodosius of Bithynia called Sphériques de Théodose, to which he added a treatise on trigonometry. He also showed an interest in a religious career, entering the Congregation of the Oratory in 1643, choosing them over other sects due to their focus on service and scholarship. He then moved to Angers to teach philosophy, and was formally ordained a priest while there in 1649. While in Angers, he not only focused his attention on theology, but also on the study of mathematics, astronomy, and science. He was then transferred back to Paris as an instructor at an Oratorian school on the Rue Saint Honoré. It is while in Paris that he published two of his works, the Astronomia Physica and De Meteoris et Fossibilus in 1660, both of which analyze and compare ancient theories with Cartesianism. This combination of theoretical and scientific analysis made many of Du Hamel's contemporaries see him and his work as a link between theology and the new ideas of science.
Read more about this topic: Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea—of an ideal.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)