Who is a French scholar that specialized in Physics and astronomy?
Pierre-Simon Laplace Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace ( ; ] ; 23 March 1749 – 5 March 1827) was an influential French scholar whose work was important to the development of mathematics, statistics, physics and astronomy. He summarised and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume "Mécanique Céleste" ("Celestial Mechanics") (1799–1825). This work translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a broader range of problems. In statistics, the Bayesian interpretation of probability was developed mainly by Laplace.
Pierre de Fermat Pierre de Fermat (] ; (Between 31 October and 6 December 1607 – 12 January 1665) was a French lawyer at the "Parlement" of Toulouse, France, and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' "Arithmetica".