Born: 25 Jan 1627 in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland. Died: 30 Dec 1691 in London, England

Anglo-Irish physicist and chemist. Often referred to as the father of modern chemistry, he separated chemistry from alchemy and gave the first precise definitions of a chemical element, a chemical reaction, and chemical analysis. He invented a vacuum pump and used it in the discovery (1662) of what is known as Boyle's law.

Boyle studied at Eton College from 1635 to 1639. He read Galileo's works while on a five year European tour, with a private tutor, begun in 1639 when he was 12 years old. After the tour, spent mostly in Switzerland, he returned to Dorset in England where he began his experimental scientific work and wrote moral essays.

Boyle was the prime exemplar of the experimental philosophy espoused by the Royal Society in its formative years. In a whole series of books in which experimental and experiential data was carefully expounded, Boyle sought to vindicate a mechanistic view of nature at the expense of rival theories, notably the worldview associated with Aristotelian scholasticism. Boyle was also a major apologist for the new science, expounding its rationale, working out its philosophical implications and reflecting at length on the mutual relations between science and religion.

From 1656 he lived in Oxford where he collaborated with Hooke. He made important contributions to physics and chemistry and is best known for Boyle's law (sometimes called Mariotte's Law) describing an ideal gas. Boyle's law appears in an appendix written in 1661 to his work New Experiments Physio-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects (1660).

The years that Boyle spent at Oxford, prior to his move to London in 1668, also saw an extraordinarily intense programme of writing on his part. It was at this time that he began or completed the numerous books on different aspects of natural philosophy which set the pattern for his subsequent intellectual career, and on which, when he began to publish on a sustained scale from 1660 onwards, his later fame was based. These included his New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of Air and its Effects (1660), Certain Physiological Essays (1661), The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663, 1671), Experiments and Considerations touching Colours (1664), New Experiments and Observations touching Cold (1665), Hydrostatical Paradoxes (1666) and The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666).

In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Boyle argued against Aristotle's view of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. He argued that matter was composed of corpuscles which themselves were differently built up of different configurations of primary particles.

Boyle was a founding fellow of the Royal Society. He published results on the physical properties of air through this Society. His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a mathematical science based on a mechanistic theory of matter. Boyle influenced Newton and many later scientists.

Sources: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Boyle.html

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/Boyle/Biog.html