Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont

Jean-Baptiste Armand Louis Léonce Élie de Beaumont was a French geologist. Among his ideas was that mountains were created in a series of episodes over geological time due to the cooling and shrinking of the earth. He also suggested that there was a pattern in the orientation of the mountain systems of the world which followed a system of five circles meeting at points on the earth that marked the points of a polyhedron.