educated in law and medicine. Buffon’s principal interest was in nature: he was struck by the diversity of life. At the age of twenty he encountered the binomial theorem and his first work, Sur le jeu de franc-carreau, introduced differential and integral calculus into probability theory. He was appointed keeper of the French botanical gardens and his study of plants and their development led to his publication (in about forty volumes) of Histoire Naturelle (Natural History), which tried to show the continuity of nature. He had no concept of evolution, believing that species are fixed. He speculated that the Earth might have been created by the collision of a comet with the Sun. Based on the cooling rate of iron, he proclaimed that the age of the Earth was 75 000 years; as a result the Catholic Church (which, at that time, claimed 6 000 years as the age of the Earth) ordered that his books should be burnt. A street in Paris and a lunar crater are named after him.

http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/buffon.htm Commentary and portrait.