Alphonse Antonio de Sarasa, SJ was a

Jesuit The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

mathematician who contributed to the understanding of

logarithm In mathematics, the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of to base is , because is to the rd power: . More generally, if , the ...

s, particularly as

area Area is the measure of a region's size on a surface. The area of a plane region or ''plane area'' refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while '' surface area'' refers to the area of an open surface or the boundary of a three-di ...

s under a

hyperbola In mathematics, a hyperbola is a type of smooth function, smooth plane curve, curve lying in a plane, defined by its geometric properties or by equations for which it is the solution set. A hyperbola has two pieces, called connected component ( ...

Biography

Alphonse de Sarasa was born in 1618, in Nieuwpoort in Flanders. In 1632 he was admitted as a

novice A novice is a person who has entered a religious order and is under probation, before taking vows. A ''novice'' can also refer to a person (or animal e.g. racehorse) who is entering a profession with no prior experience. Religion Buddhism ...

Ghent Ghent ( ; ; historically known as ''Gaunt'' in English) is a City status in Belgium, city and a Municipalities of Belgium, municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the Provinces of Belgium, province ...

. It was there that he worked alongside Gregoire de Saint-Vincent whose ideas he developed, exploited, and promulgated. According to Sommervogel, Alphonse de Sarasa also held academic positions in Antwerp and Brussels. In 1649 Alphonse de Sarasa published ''Solutio problematis a R.P. Marino Mersenne Minimo propositi''. This book was in response to

Marin Mersenne Marin Mersenne, OM (also known as Marinus Mersennus or ''le Père'' Mersenne; ; 8 September 1588 – 1 September 1648) was a French polymath whose works touched a wide variety of fields. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for ...

's pamphlet "Reflexiones Physico-mathematicae" which reviewed Saint-Vincent's ''Opus Geometricum'' and posed this challenge: : Given three arbitrary magnitudes, rational or irrational, and given the logarithms of the two, to find the logarithm of the third geometrically. R.P. BurnR. P. Burn (2001) "Alphonse Antonio de Sarasa and Logarithms",

Historia Mathematica ''Historia Mathematica: International Journal of History of Mathematics'' is an academic journal on the history of mathematics published by Elsevier. It was established by Kenneth O. May in 1971 as the free newsletter ''Notae de Historia Mathemat ...

28:1 – 17 explains that the term ''logarithm'' was used differently in the seventeenth century. Logarithms were any

arithmetic progression An arithmetic progression or arithmetic sequence is a sequence of numbers such that the difference from any succeeding term to its preceding term remains constant throughout the sequence. The constant difference is called common difference of that ...

which corresponded to a

geometric progression A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a mathematical sequence of non-zero numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed number called the ''common ratio''. For example, the s ...

. Burn says, in reviewing de Sarasa's popularization of de Saint-Vincent, and concurring with

Moritz Cantor Moritz Benedikt Cantor (23 August 1829 – 10 April 1920) was a German historian of mathematics. Biography Cantor was born at Mannheim. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch ...

, that "the relationship between logarithms and the hyperbola was found by Saint-Vincent in all but name". Burn quotes de Sarasa on this point: "…the foundation of the teaching embracing logarithms are contained" in Saint-Vincent's ''Opus Geometricum'', part 4 of Book 6, ''de Hyperbola''. Alphonse Antonio de Sarasa died in Brussels in 1667.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Sarasa, Alphonse Antonio De Jesuits from the Spanish Netherlands 1618 births 1667 deaths Mathematicians from the Spanish Netherlands Logarithms People from Nieuwpoort, Belgium Jesuit scientists

Biography

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References