Jean Truchet (1657 – 5 February 1729), known as Father Sébastian, was a French Dominican priest born in Lyon, who lived under the reign of Louis XIV.

[2] In 1693, he was selected by Abbé Bignon to assist his commission investigating the feasibility of compiling a description of all France's artistic and industrial processes for the minister Colbert.

The commission then invented the first typographic point, using minute fractions of the line to create a bitmap that could be used to mathematically describe and italicize metal type.

[4] In 1699, at the second public meeting of the French Academy, Truchet spoke on the motion of falling bodies,[5] and nearly 20 years later he was one of several scientists to confirm Newton's model of the separation of white light into colors.

[4] One particular pattern that he studied involved square tiles split by a diagonal line into two triangles, decorated in contrasting colors.