Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (French: [ʒozɛf ɑ̃twan fɛʁdinɑ̃ plato]; 14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist and mathematician.

While attending primary school, he was particularly impressed by a lesson of physics; enchanted by the experiments he observed, he vowed to discover their secrets someday.

[4] Plateau spent his school holidays in Marche-les-Dames, with his uncle and his family; his cousin and playfellow was Auguste Payen, who later became an architect and the principal designer of the Belgian railways.

[4] At the age of fourteen, he lost his father and mother; the trauma caused by this loss made him fall ill.[6] On 27 August 1840, Plateau married Augustine–Thérèse–Aimée–Fanny Clavareau,[7] and they had a son a year later.

[9] Fascinated by the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina, Plateau performed an experiment in which he gazed directly into the Sun for 25 seconds.

It contained the first results of his research into the effect of colours on the retina (duration, intensity, and colour), his mathematical research into the intersections of revolving curves (locus), the observation of the distortion of moving images, and the reconstruction of distorted images through counter revolving discs (he dubbed these anorthoscopic discs).