Jacques Rose Ferdinand Émile Sarrau (

Perpignan Perpignan (, , ; ; ) is the prefectures in France, prefecture of the Pyrénées-Orientales departments of France, department in Southern France, in the heart of the plain of Roussillon, at the foot of the Pyrenees a few kilometres from the Me ...

24 June 1837 – Saint-Yrieix 10 May 1904) was a French

chemist A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a graduated scientist trained in the study of chemistry, or an officially enrolled student in the field. Chemists study the composition of ...

. He worked most of his career at the laboratory in the Dépôt Central des Poudres et Salpêtres (Central Depot for Powder and Saltpetre). He did research on explosive

shock wave In physics, a shock wave (also spelled shockwave), or shock, is a type of propagating disturbance that moves faster than the local speed of sound in the medium. Like an ordinary wave, a shock wave carries energy and can propagate through a me ...

s, the effects of explosives and he developed new explosives. The

Mach number The Mach number (M or Ma), often only Mach, (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound. It is named after the Austrian physicist and philosopher Erns ...

was sometimes called in French the Nombre de Sarrau (Sarrau number).

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