Saint-Vincent

Gregorius Saint-Vincent

Born: 8 Sept 1584 in Bruges, Belgium
Died: 27 Jan 1667 in Ghent, Belgium

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Saint-Vincent was a student of Clavius and worked as a mathematician at Louvain from 1621.

Saint-Vincent's main work is a book over 1250 pages long. There are many topics covered in the book including a study of circles, triangles, geometric series, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas.

His book also contains his quadrature method which is related to that of Cavalieri but which he discovered independently. He gives a method of squaring the circle which we can now see is essentially integration.

Saint-Vincent integrated x^-^1 in a geometric form that is easily recognized as the logarithmic function.

Other Web sites:

Rice University, USA

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. H Bosmans, Saint-Vincent (Grégoire de), Biographie nationale belge XXI, 141-171.
  3. A Meskens, Gregory of Saint Vincent : A Pioneer of the Calculus, The Mathematical Gazette 78 (1994), 315-319. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996