Mathieu Tillet
French botanist (1714-1791)
Mathieu Tillet (10 November 1714 Bordeaux - 13 December 1791) was a French botanist, agronomist, metallurgist and administrator.
Life
He was the son of the goldsmith Gabriel Tillet and began studying metals at his father's workshop. In 1740 he was appointed Director of the Mint at Troyes. Ten years later he published his first book, about alloys. In 1750, he was awarded a prize by the Academy of Bordeaux for his research concerning the plagues of cereals, especially wheat. In 1755, he published the results of his research as Dissertation sur la cause qui corrompt et noircit les grains de blé dans les épis; et sur les moyens de prévenir ces accidents (Explanation of the cause that corrupts and blackens the grains of wheat in the ears; and the means to prevent these accidents), and was awarded another prize for it. The fungus Tilletia tritici, which he describes in this work, was named after him a century later by Charles and Louis Tulasne. In 1756 he resigned from his post at the Mint at Troyes and moved to Paris, living on Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame.
On 9 September 1758, he was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences as a botanist. He occupied several offices at the academy over the next decades, finally becoming Treasurer in 1788, after the death of his predecessor Buffon.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mathieu Tillet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.