Hendrik van Heuraet

Hendrik van Heuraet, also known as Henrici van Heuraet, was a Dutch mathematician born in 1634 and dying around 1660, noted as one of the founders of the integral and author of the Epistola de Transmutatione Curvarum Linearum in Rectas of 1659, on the transformation of curves into straight lines. The son of a cloth merchant, he became financially independent at twenty-one, studied medicine at Leiden from 1653, where he met Frans van Schooten and later Johannes Hudde and Christiaan Huygens, and then studied mathematics privately with Van Schooten. In 1658 he and Hudde left for Saumur, and he returned to Leiden the next year as a physician. His two papers appeared in Van Schooten's Latin edition of Descartes's La Géométrie of 1659. In them he gave the construction of inflection points on the conchoid, computed an integral applied to the parabola, and found the arc length of the semicubical parabola, which led to a priority dispute with Huygens.