Jacques-François Le Poivre

Jacques-François Le Poivre was a mathematician and geometer, a pioneer of projective geometry, born in Mons on 11 February 1652 and dying on 6 December 1710. He is largely known from a single book in French on conic sections, the Traité des sections du cylindre et du cône considérées dans le solide et dans le plan, avec des démonstrations simples et nouvelles, published in 1704. He came from a family with many engineers, studied mathematics and geometry, and worked as a clerk and surveyor for the city of Mons before moving to Paris in 1700. His treatise escaped serious study and some reviewers thought it plagiarised Philippe de La Hire, whose method of central projection in his 1673 work it closely resembles, though it has been suggested that Le Poivre found it independently, since the book contains several original theorems. A second edition appeared in 1708. He was a friend of Guillaume de l'Hôpital, and his simple proof of the intersecting chords theorem impressed l'Hôpital.