?-1684

French physicist celebrated as one of the founders of French experimental physics. Mariotte produced the first comprehensive work on elastic and inelastic collisions (1673), relying heavily on the work of Christiaan Huygens, John Wallis, and Christopher Wren. In 1676 he made an important qualification to Boyle's law by noting that the inverse relationship between volume and pressure only holds if temperature remains constant. He attempted to calculate the atmosphere's height from this law. Mariotte also discovered the eye's blind spot (1668).