1813–1884 · French Hellenist, historian of science and philosopher
Thomas-Henri Martin was born at Bellême in 1813, entered the École normale in 1831, and took his doctorate in 1836 with a Latin thesis on Spinoza. He spent his career at Rennes, as professor of ancient literature and eventually dean of the Faculty of Letters, and made his name on the boundary between classical scholarship and the history of science — a long edition of and commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, studies of ancient astronomy, and in 1868 Galilée : les droits de la science et la méthode des sciences physiques. He died at Rennes in 1884, and the one sentence of his that everybody knows is filed under somebody else’s name.