biography
pronunciation:
[peekah(r)]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1620–82)
|
| biography:
| Astronomer, born in La Flèche, NW France. In 1655 he became professor in the Collège de France and helped to found the Paris Observatory. He made the first accurate measurement of a degree of a meridian, and thus arrived at an estimate of the radius of the Earth. He visited Tycho Brahe's observatory on the island of Hven, and determined its latitude and longitude. |
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