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Gregory of St Vincent and the rectangular hyperbola

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

Bob Burn
Bob Burn*
Affiliation:
Sunnyside, Barrack Road, Exeter EX2 6AB email: R.P.Burn@exeter.ac.uk
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Extract

The Belgian Jesuit, Gregory of St Vincent (1584 - 1667), along with Cavaleri, Fermat and Descartes was amongst those who prepared the way for the calculus of Newton and Leibniz. He was the author of one long book Opus Geometricum (1647) in which he gave a more precise account of progressions and limits than had been previously available and which Leibniz particularly valued. The term ‘exhaustion’, for the limiting process of the Greeks, is due to Gregory of St Vincent. This book contains a section on the hyperbola in which Gregory studied the area between the curve and an asymptote and this section provided the basis for Anthony de Sarasa's claim in 1649 that the area here was like a logarithm.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 84 , Issue 501 , November 2000 , pp. 480 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 2000

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References

1. Fauvel, J. and Gray, J. The History of Mathematics, a Reader, Macmillan (1987).Google Scholar
2. Dhombres, J. Is One Proof Enough? Travels with a Mathematician of the Baroque Period, Educational Studies in Mathematics, 24, 4 (1993) pp. 401–419.Google Scholar