Boscovich, ROGER JOSEPH

Boscovich, ROGER JOSEPH, a celebrated mathematician and astronomer, was born at Ragusa in 1711, and at an early age entered the order of the Jesuits. Before the completion of his course of studies in Rome, he was appointed teacher of Mathematics and Philosophy in the Collegium Romanum there; his reputation had been previously established by a solution of the problem to find the sun's equator and fix the time of his rotation by observing the spots. The pope gave him a commission to measure a degree of the meridian in the States of the Church. He was sent to London in 1760 in defence of the interests of Ragusa. In 1764 he was appointed to a professorship in Pavia, and subsequently at Milan. After the dissolution of his order in 1773, he went to Paris, received a pension from the king, and was appointed director of optics to the navy. Boscovich afterwards returned to Milan, but fell into a depression of spirits, which at last grew into complete insanity. He died in 1787. His works include dissertations on a great variety of important questions in mathematical and physical science, and were published collectively under the title Opera Pertinentia ad Opticam et Astronomiam (5 vols. 1785). His name is connected with a molecular theory of physics, first published in his Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis (Vienna, 1758). He was also a poet, and his Latin poem, De Solis ac Lunæ Defectibus (1764), was dedicated to the London Royal Society, of which he had been elected a member.