Jules Antoine Lissajous (March 4, 1822, Versailles – June 24, 1880, Plombières-les-Bains) was a French mathematician, after whom Lissajous figures are named. Among other innovations, Lissajous invented the Lissajous apparatus, a device that creates the figures that bear his name. In it a beam of light is bounced off a mirror attached to a vibrating tuning fork, and then reflected off a second mirror attached to a perpendicularly orientated vibrating tuning fork (usually of a different pitch, creating a specific harmonic interval), onto a wall, resulting in a Lissajous figure. This led to the invention of other apparatus such as the harmonograph.
Famous quotes containing the words jules and/or antoine:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“‘Twas a balmy summer evening, and a goodly crowd was there.
Which well-nigh filled Joe’s barroom on the corner of the square,”
—Hugh Antoine D’Arcy (1843–1925)