Il padre Perotus. Identificazione di un personaggio citato nel "De ratione"

P PEROTUS. RECOGNITION OF A PERSON MENTIONED IN THE DE RATIONE. This article reconstructs the identity of a person cited by G. Vico in his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione with the name P. Perotus. Vico mentions him as the naval theoretician who made an attempt to build an ideal ship according to the rules of Cartesian analytical geometry and failed miserably. For more than three hundreds years it has been impossible to identify the person and the case Vico refers to. Using documents of the time and some electronic tools, this article identifies Vico's "pater Perotus" as the French jesuit Paul Hoste, mathematician and teacher in Toulon naval school at the end of the XVIIth Century.