Gregory St. Vincent

Grégoire de Saint-Vincent

Gregory St. Vincent (22 March 1584 Bruges – 5 June 1667 Ghent) was a Flemish Jesuit and mathematician.

Quotes

• Liber hic fere Lemmaticus est, quemadmodum & alter, qui de Circulorum variis proprietatibus tractat. Porrò quo magis materia Lectori admanum sint, omnem in tres partes dividere placuit.
Prima quidem maximè circa linearum proportionem versatur.
Secunda varias trianguli affectiones exhibet.
Tertia illas linearum contemplatur proprietates, quae earum potentias concernunt.
• This book is generally concerned with a lemma [i. e. the harmonic ratio, whereby a line segment is divided internally and externally in the same ratio], as with the following one which draws out various properties of circles. Again, so that more material should be at hand to the reader, it was determined to set everything out in three parts.
The first part is mainly concerned with the proportions of lines.
The second shows the various uses of triangles.
The third considers these properties of lines which are concerned with powers.

• Grégoire de Saint-Vincent, a Jesuit, born in Bruges in 1584 and died in Ghent in 1667, discovered the expansion of ${\displaystyle log(1+x)}$ in ascending powers of ${\displaystyle x}$. Although a circle squarer, he is worthy of mention for the numerous theorems of interest which he discovered in his search after the impossible... He wrote two books on the subject [1647, 1668]... the fallacy in the quadrature was pointed out by 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.