Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (; 14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgium physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image.
Biography
Plateau was born on 14 October 1801,
in
Brussels.
His father,
Antoine Plateau (
fr) born in
Tournai, was a talented flower painter.
[: this ample biographical paper is used in this section as the main reference.] At the age of six, the younger Plateau already could read, making him a
child prodigy in those times. While attending primary school, he was particularly impressed by a lesson of
physics; enchanted by the experiments he observed, he vowed to discover their secrets someday.
Plateau spent his school holidays in
Marche-les-Dames, with his uncle and his family; his cousin and playfellow was
Auguste Payen, who later became an architect and the principal designer of the Belgian railways.
At the age of fourteen, he lost his father and mother; the trauma caused by this loss made him fall ill.
On 27 August 1840, Plateau married Augustine–Thérèse–Aimée–Fanny Clavareau,[Commonly referred as Fanny Clavareau: see the , web site section " Plateau's blindness".] and they had a son a year later.
Fascinated by the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina, Plateau performed an experiment in which he gazed directly into the Sun for 25 seconds. He lost his eyesight later in his life and attributed the loss to this experiment. However, this may not have been the case, and he may have instead had chronic uveitis.
Plateau became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1872.
Plateau died in Ghent in 1883.
Academic career
Plateau studied at the State University of Liège, where he graduated as a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences in 1829.
In 1827, Plateau became a teacher of mathematics at the "Atheneum" school in Brussels.
Research
Optics
In 1829, Plateau submitted his doctoral thesis to his mentor
Adolphe Quetelet for advice. It contained only 27 pages but formulated a great number of fundamental conclusions. It contained the first results of his research into the effect of colours on the
retina (duration, intensity, and colour), his mathematical research into the intersections of revolving curves (locus), the observation of the distortion of moving images, and the reconstruction of distorted images through counter revolving discs (he dubbed these
anorthoscope).
[See the , web site section " Anorthoscope".]
In 1832, Plateau invented an early
stroboscope device, the "
phenakistiscope", the first device to give the illusion of a moving image. It consisted of two disks, one with small equidistant radial windows, through which the viewer could look, and another containing a sequence of images. When the two disks rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows and the images created an animated effect. The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of
film.
[See the , web site section " Phenakistiscope".]
Plateau's problem
Plateau also studied the phenomena of
capillary action and
surface tension.
[ vol. 1 and vol. 2.] The mathematical problem of existence of a
minimal surface with a given boundary is named after him. He conducted extensive studies of
and formulated Plateau's laws, which describe the structures formed by such films in foams.
Works
In popular culture
On 14 October 2019, the search engine
Google commemorated Plateau with a
Google Doodle on his 218th birth anniversary. This doodle was created by animator, filmmaker, and Doodler Olivia Huynh with inspiration and help from Diana Tran and Tom Tabanao. It is the first Google Doodle with different artwork showing up across different device displays—desktop, mobile, and the Google App.
See also
-
Patterns in nature
-
Plateau's laws
-
Plateau's problem
-
Plateau–Rayleigh instability
-
Soap bubble
-
Stretched grid method
Sources
-
A commemorative paper of nearly 100 pages describing many aspects of his life and research, including a portrait of him and authored by his son in Law, Gustaaf Van der Mensbrugghe.
External links
