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René-François De Sluse
René-François Walter de Sluse (; also Renatius Franciscus Slusius or Walther de Sluze; 2 July 1622 – 19 March 1685) was a Walloon mathematician and churchman, who served as the canon of Liège and abbot of Amay. Biography He was born in Visé, Spanish Netherlands (in present-day Belgium) and studied at the University of Leuven (1638–1642) before receiving a master's degree in law from the University of Rome, La Sapienza in 1643. There he also studied several languages, mathematics and astronomy. Aside from mathematics he also produced works on astronomy, physics, natural history, general history and theological subjects related to his work in the Church. He became a canon of the Catholic church in 1650, soon after which he became canon of Liège. In 1666 he took a new position as abbot of Amay. His position in the church prevented him from visiting other mathematicians, but he corresponded with the mathematicians and intellectuals of the day; his correspondents include ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Visé
Visé (; nl, Wezet, ; wa, Vizé) is a city and municipality of Wallonia, located on the river Meuse in the province of Liège, Belgium. The municipality consists of the following districts: Argenteau, Cheratte, Lanaye, Lixhe, Richelle, and Visé. In the north-east (on the eastern bank of the Meuse) the area of the municipality extends up to the village of Moelingen in the Limburgian municipality of Voeren, while in the north-west (on the western bank of the Meuse) it extends up to the border between Belgium and the Netherlands (on the other side of which the Dutch municipality of Maastricht is situated). The city of Visé is located in a distance of some 20 km (12,4 miles) north eastern of Belgian Liège city and of some 15 km (9,3 miles) southern of the most southern Dutch city of Maastricht. In addition to the Meuse, the Albert Canal also passes through this town. History The Germans entered Belgium on 4 August 1914, and entered Visé that day a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens, Lord of Zeelhem, ( , , ; also spelled Huyghens; la, Hugenius; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor, who is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. In physics, Huygens made groundbreaking contributions in optics and mechanics, while as an astronomer he is chiefly known for his studies of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan. As an engineer and inventor, he improved the design of telescopes and invented the pendulum clock, a breakthrough in timekeeping and the most accurate timekeeper for almost 300 years. An exceptionally talented mathematician and physicist, Huygens was the first to idealize a physical problem by a set of mathematical parameters, and the first to fully mathematize a mechanistic explanation of an unobservable physical phenomenon.Dijksterhuis, F.J. (2008) Stevin, Huygens and the Dutch re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gilles De Roberval
Gilles Personne de Roberval (August 10, 1602 – October 27, 1675), French mathematician, was born at Roberval near Beauvais, France. His name was originally Gilles Personne or Gilles Personier, with Roberval the place of his birth. Biography Like René Descartes, he was present at the siege of La Rochelle in 1627. In the same year he went to Paris, and in 1631 he was appointed the philosophy chair at Gervais College, Paris. Two years after that, in 1633, he was also made the chair of mathematics at the Royal College of France. A condition of tenure attached to this particular chair was that the holder (Roberval, in this case) would propose mathematical questions for solution, and should resign in favour of any person who solved them better than himself. Notwithstanding this, Roberval was able to keep the chair till his death. Roberval was one of those mathematicians who, just before the invention of the infinitesimal calculus, occupied their attention with problems which a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
René Descartes
René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes considered himself a devout Catholic. Many elements of Descartes' philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre De Fermat
Pierre de Fermat (; between 31 October and 6 December 1607 – 12 January 1665) was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for his Fermat's principle for light propagation and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' '' Arithmetica''. He was also a lawyer at the '' Parlement'' of Toulouse, France. Biography Fermat was born in 1607 in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France—the late 15th-century mansion where Fermat was born is now a museum. He was from Gascony, where his father, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a " natural philosopher"), widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists and among the most influential scientists of all time. He was a key figure in the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. His book (''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy''), first published in 1687, established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus. In the , Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tangent
In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Leibniz defined it as the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve at a point if the line passes through the point on the curve and has slope , where ''f'' is the derivative of ''f''. A similar definition applies to space curves and curves in ''n''-dimensional Euclidean space. As it passes through the point where the tangent line and the curve meet, called the point of tangency, the tangent line is "going in the same direction" as the curve, and is thus the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point. The tangent line to a point on a differentiable curve can also be thought of as a '' tangent line approximation'', the graph of the affine function that best approximates the original function at the given point. Similarly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johannes Hudde
Johannes (van Waveren) Hudde (23 April 1628 – 15 April 1704) was a burgomaster (mayor) of Amsterdam between 1672 – 1703, a mathematician and governor of the Dutch East India Company. As a "burgemeester" of Amsterdam he ordered that the city canals should be flushed at high tide and that the polluted water of the town "secreten" should be diverted to pits outside the town instead of into the canals. He also promoted hygiene in and around the town's water supply. "Hudde's stones" were marker stones that were used to mark the summer high water level at several points in the city. They later were the foundation for the " NAP", the now Europe-wide system for measuring water levels.J.P.M KwaaHet Normal Amsterdam Peil (NAP)(Dutch) Mathematical work Hudde studied law at the University of Leiden, but turned to mathematics under the influence of his teacher Frans van Schooten. From 1654 to 1663 he worked under van Schooten. ''La Géométrie'' (1637) by René Descartes provi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called '' conjugation'', and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as '' declension''. An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ', meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix ', expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word ''lead'' is not infle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tangents
In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Leibniz defined it as the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve at a point if the line passes through the point on the curve and has slope , where ''f'' is the derivative of ''f''. A similar definition applies to space curves and curves in ''n''-dimensional Euclidean space. As it passes through the point where the tangent line and the curve meet, called the point of tangency, the tangent line is "going in the same direction" as the curve, and is thus the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point. The tangent line to a point on a differentiable curve can also be thought of as a '' tangent line approximation'', the graph of the affine function that best approximates the original function at the given point. Similarly, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spirals
In mathematics, a spiral is a curve which emanates from a point, moving farther away as it revolves around the point. Helices Two major definitions of "spiral" in the American Heritage Dictionary are:Spiral ''American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Houghton Mifflin Company, Fourth Edition, 2009. # a curve on a plane that winds around a fixed center point at a continuously increasing or decreasing distance from the point. # a three-dimensional curve that turns around an axis at a constant or continuously varying distance while moving parallel to the axis; a . The first definition describes a |
