Frans van Schooten

Frans van Schooten Jr., also called Franciscus van Schooten, was a Dutch mathematician, born in 1615 and dying on 29 May 1660, who is most known for popularizing the analytic geometry of René Descartes. His Latin translation of La Géométrie in 1649, with commentary, made the work comprehensible to the wider mathematical community. He then enlisted Johannes Hudde, Johan de Witt, Hendrik van Heuraet and Florimond de Beaune and expanded the commentaries into two volumes, published in 1659 and 1661, the edition that Leibniz and Newton knew. In exercises published in 1657 he was among the first to suggest extending these ideas to three-dimensional space. He inherited his father's chair at Leiden's Engineering School in 1645, taught Christiaan Huygens as one of his most important pupils, and made Leiden for a time the centre of the mathematical community. An elementary geometry theorem bears his name.