Robert Boyle was born January 25, 1627, in Listmore, County Cavan in Ireland and died December 30, 1691, in London. He was a chemist and a natural philosopher. He was noted for his pioneer experiments on the properties of gasses and espousal of a corpuscular view of matter. It was a forerunner of the modern theory of chemical elements. Sent to Eton College in 1635, Boyle read Galileo's works during a European tour (1639-44). At Oxford he collaborated with Robert Hooke in constructing an air pump with which he conducted the experiments leading to his publication (1662) of the relationship, now known as Boyle's law, that at constant temperature the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its pressure. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Boyle attacked the Aristotelian and alchemical views of the composition of matter, proposing that it consists of a single, primary substance that forms clusters, or corpuscles, of varying complexity.

Beginning in 1668, he lived in London and continued experimental work on the calcination of metals and the distinction between acids and alkalies. Celebrated during his lifetime, Boyle promoted Christianity abroad and advocated the scientific study of nature as a religious duty. He endowed a series of lectures on the consistency of Christian religion and scientific investigation.
Boyle's law, called Mariotte's Law in Europe, is a relation concerning the compression and expansion of a gas at constant temperature. This empirical relation, formulated by Boyle in 1662, states that the pressure (p) of a gas varies inversely as its volume (v) at constant temperature; in equation form, pv=k, and is a constant. The relationship was also discovered by the French physicist Edme Mariotte in 1676.
The law can be derived from the kinetic theory of gasses assuming a perfect (ideal) gas. Real gasses obey Boyle's law at sufficiently low pressures, although the product pv generally decreases slightly as the gas pressure is raised to appreciably higher values.