Augustin Jean Fresnel

By the death of Augustin Jean Fresnel, France lost a brilliant scientist, who shares with Thomas Young the honor of discrediting the old emission theory of light, and of formulating the undulatory theory.

A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year Volume Two (of Three) Edwin Emerson 1914

So it chanced that when, in 1815, a young French military engineer, named Augustin Jean Fresnel, returning from the Napoleonic wars, became interested in the phenomena of light, and made some experiments concerning diffraction which seemed to him to controvert the accepted notions of the materiality of light, he was quite unaware that his experiments had been anticipated by a philosopher across the Channel.

A History of Science: in Five Volumes. Volume III: Modern development of the physical sciences 1904