course: Pre-indivisibles, indivisibles, and post-indivisibles in the manuscripts of Gregory of Saint-Vincent from 1625 to his Opus Geometricum of 1647
speaker: Jean Dhombres (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)abstract: There is an impressive amount of mathematical manuscripts left by Gregory of Saint-Vincent. They were generally written by students, and more than often written in defense of the Jesuit, who came to Rome in 1624 in order to justify his pretentions about quadratures. The quadrature of the hyperbola gave rise to the logarithmic function considered as an integral,and it was published in 1649. It also led to an indenpendent definition of the exponential function published in 1648. The quadrature of the circle was proven wrong by Christiaan Huygens in 1651. Gregory was not lacking ideas, developped a special theory of "ductus", and almost never quoted his contemporaries, like Cavalieri. One may however follow the various uses he made of "indivisibles" for almost a quarter of a century, as he was keen to lenghtily explain his works in relation to the method of exhaustion, to which he provided a name.
timetable:
Fri 21 Oct, 17:00 - 18:00, Sala Conferenze Centro De Giorgi
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