Bouguer

Bouguer is a French surname most often associated with Pierre Bouguer (1698–1758), a mathematician, hydrographer and geophysicist whose work helped lay foundations in navigation, measurement science and gravity research. The name has been attached to several scientific concepts through his contributions and subsequent developments.

In optics, Bouguer's law is a component of the Beer-Lambert-Bouguer law, which describes how light is attenuated as it passes through a absorbing medium. The law relates the decrease in light intensity to the path length through the material and the concentration of absorbing species, and it is widely used in spectrophotometry and analytical chemistry.

In geophysics and gravimetry, the Bouguer correction is a standard adjustment applied to observed gravity data to account for the gravitational attraction of the topography above the measurement point. By removing the gravity contributed by surrounding terrain (often assuming a uniform crustal density), the corrected value allows gravity measurements at different elevations to be compared. The remaining residual field, the Bouguer anomaly, highlights subsurface density variations and is used in geological and geophysical interpretation.

The Bouguer surname thus appears in multiple scientific contexts, reflecting Pierre Bouguer’s influence on early measurement methods and his enduring association with principles governing light absorption and gravitational correction.