Grégoire de Saint-Vincent

Gregory of Saint-Vincent, known as Grégoire de Saint-Vincent and in Latin as Gregorius a Sancto Vincentio, was a Flemish Jesuit mathematician born in Bruges in 1584. He studied at the Jesuit college in Bruges, then at Douai, entered the Jesuit order in 1607 and was a student of Christopher Clavius at the Collegio Romano, who persuaded him to stay on to study mathematics and theology. He was ordained a priest in 1613 and taught in several Jesuit colleges, including mathematics at Antwerp and Louvain. At Louvain he developed methods that helped set the scene for the invention of the differential and integral calculus, worked out the theory of conic sections from the editions of Archimedes, Apollonius and Pappus, and developed a fruitful method of infinitesimals. His Problema Austriacum, a quadrature of the circle, was the work he regarded as most important. He died in Ghent in 1667.