Grégoire de Saint-Vincent

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Grégoire de Saint-Vincent (March 22 1584 Bruges – June 5 1667 Ghent), a Jesuit, was a mathematician who independently discovered the Mercator series, the expansion of log(1 + x) in ascending powers of x.

Although a circle-squarer he is known for the numerous theorems which he discovered in his search for the impossible; Montucla ingeniously remarks that "no one ever squared the circle with so much ability or (except for his principal object) with so much success." He wrote two books on the subject, one published in 1647 and the other in 1668, which cover some two or three thousand closely printed pages; the fallacy in the quadrature was pointed out by Christiaan Huygens. In the former work he used indivisibles. An earlier work entitled Theoremata Mathematica, published in 1624, contains a clear account of the method of exhaustions, which is applied to several quadratures, notably that of the hyperbola.

[edit] External links

• Gregory Saint Vincent, and his polar coordinates from Jesuit history, tradition and spirituality by Joseph F. MacDonnell.

An original entry was based on the Rouse History of Mathematics