Nicolas Sarrabat

Fr. Nicolas Sarrabat or Sarabat (7 February 1698 – 27 April 1739), also known as Nicolas Sarrabat de la Baisse, was an eighteenth-century French mathematician and scientist. He was born in Lyon, the son of the painter Daniel Sarrabat (1666–1748), and the nephew of engraver Isaac Sarrabat. The Sarrabats had been a prosperous Protestant bourgeois family of clock- and watchmakers, though Nicolas's father had converted to Catholicism.

Sarrabat showed a love of learning from an early age. He was said to have started his studies without his parents' knowledge; they only became aware of them when Nicolas submitted and defended a thesis at the Lyon Collège de la Trinité in the presence of his father, who had been tricked into attending. He went on to enter the Jesuit order, and was employed as the Royal Professor of Mathematics at Marseille.