Mathieu de la Porte

Mathieu de la Porte, born in Nijmegen in the seventeenth century and died in 1722, was a French mathematician, the son of a French merchant who had moved to the Netherlands. He moved back to France at the age of 18 and recanted the Protestant faith. He joined the guild of the maître écrivain and taught accounting and arithmetic. His Guide des negocians et teneurs de livres, a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping first published in Paris in 1685, is known as one of the most popular books on the subject and went through 23 editions between 1685 and 1787.