"Dumbleton was one of the first to express functional relationships in graphical form. ...Dumbleton also gave a proof of the Merton mean-speed rule... stating that "the latitude of a uniformly difform movement corresponds to the degree of the midpoint." He used the method in the Suma [Suma logicæ et philosophiæ naturalis] to study the problem of the variation in the strength of light as a function of the distance from its source. ...He realized that that the decrease in intensity of illumination was not linearly proportional to the distance... But he did not succeed in finding the exact quantitative relationship, which is that the intensity of illumination due to a luminous source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, a law discovered by Johannes Kepler in 1604."
Johannes Kepler

January 1, 1970