deathbed) the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London, and his name is ubiquitous in the modern terminology of optics and waves. After the wave theory of light was subsumed by Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in the 1860s, some attention was diverted from the magnitude of Fresnel's contribution. In the period between Fresnel's unification of physical optics and Maxwell's wider unification, a contemporary authority, Humphrey Lloyd, described Fresnel's transverse-wave theory as "the noblest fabric which has ever adorned the domain of physical science, Newton's system of the universe alone excepted." Early life Family Augustin-Jean Fresnel (also called Augustin Jean or simply Augustin), born in Broglie, Normandy, on 10 May 1788, was the second of four sons of the architect Jacques Fresnel (1755–1805) and his wife Augustine, née Mérimée (1755–1833). In 1790, following the Revolution, Broglie became part of the département of Eure. The family moved twice – in 1789/90 to Cherbourg, and in 1794 to Jacques's home town of Mathieu, where Madame Fresnel would spend 25 years as a widow, outliving two of her sons. The first son, Louis (1786–1809), was admitted to the École Polytechnique, became a lieutenant in the artillery, and was killed in action at Jaca, Spain, the day before his 23rd birthday. The third, Léonor (1790–1869), followed Augustin into civil engineering, succeeded him as secretary of the Lighthouse Commission, and helped to edit his collected works. The fourth, Fulgence Fresnel (1795–1855), became a noted linguist, diplomat, and orientalist, and occasionally assisted Augustin with negotiations. Fulgence died in Bagdad in 1855 having led a mission to explore Babylon. Léonor apparently was the only one of the four who married. Their mother's younger brother, Jean François "Léonor" Mérimée (1757–1836), father of the writer Prosper Mérimée (1803–1870), was a paint artist who turned his attention to the chemistry of painting. He became the Permanent Secretary of the École des Beaux-Arts and (until 1814) a professor at the École Polytechnique, and was the initial point of contact between Augustin and the leading optical physicists of the day . Education The Fresnel brothers were initially home-schooled by their mother. The sickly Augustin was considered the slow one, not inclined to memorization; but the popular story that he hardly began to read until the age of eight is disputed. At the age of nine or ten he was undistinguished except for his ability to turn tree-branches into toy bows and guns that