Nicolas Sarrabat

Fr. Nicolas Sarrabat or Sarabat (7 February 1698 – 27 April 1739), also known as Nicolas Sarrabat de la Baisse, was an eighteenth-century French mathematician and scientist. He was born in Lyon, the son of the painter Daniel Sarrabat (1666–1748), and the nephew of engraver Isaac Sarrabat. The Sarrabats had been a prosperous Protestant bourgeois family of clock- and watchmakers, though Nicolas's father had converted to Catholicism.

Sarrabat showed a love of learning from an early age. He was said to have started his studies without his parents' knowledge; they only became aware of them when Nicolas submitted and defended a thesis at the Lyon Collège de la Trinité in the presence of his father, who had been tricked into attending.^[1] He went on to enter the Jesuit order, and was employed as the Royal Professor of Mathematics at Marseille.