The period known as the Enlightenment was an intellectual, philosophical, and cultural movement largely taking place in Europe during the 17th and 18th century. This movement questioned what people believed for hundreds of years and changed the course of history forever. One of the many contributors to this movement was Robert Boyle FRS (Fellow of The Royal Society). Robert Boyle FRS was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher who was one of the leading figures in the scientific revolution and Enlightenment period. Some of his scientific areas included hydrostatics, physics, medicine, earth sciences, natural history, and alchemy. His most famous scientific discovery was something called Boyle's Law. “Boyle’s law, also called Mariotte’s law, is a relation concerning the compression and expansion of a gas at constant temperature. This empirical relation, formulated by the physicist Robert Boyle in 1662, states that the pressure (p) of a given quantity of gas …show more content…
His scientific work areas included optics, mechanics, and mathematics. One of his most famous discoveries was Calculus. This contributed to the Enlightenment as it changed the way people saw math and equations “Calculus, a branch of mathematics concerned with the calculation of instantaneous rates of change (differential calculus) and the summation of infinitely many small factors to determine some whole (integral calculus). Two mathematicians, Isaac Newton of England and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of Germany, share credit for having independently developed calculus in the 17th century. Calculus is now the basic entry point for anyone wishing to study physics, chemistry, biology, economics, finance, or actuarial science. Calculus makes it possible to solve problems as diverse as tracking the position of a space shuttle or predicting the pressure building up behind a dam” (Encyclopedia