Tommaso Ceva

Tommaso Ceva was an Italian Jesuit mathematician from Milan, born on 20 December 1648 and dying on 3 February 1737, and the brother of Giovanni Ceva. Educated at the Jesuit Collegio di Brera, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1663 and taught mathematics and rhetoric there for thirty-eight years. His most famous student was Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, who wrote his first work, Quaesita geometrica of 1693, under his tutelage. He was a leading figure of Clelia Grillo Borromeo's Academia Vigilantium. His De natura gravium of 1699 treated gravity and free fall philosophically, and his only mathematical work, Opuscula Mathematica of 1699, dealt with geometry, gravity and arithmetic. He designed an instrument for dividing a right angle into equal parts, which won him the attention of Leibniz, and in his Philosophia novo-antiqua of 1704 he defended scholasticism against Descartes and Gassendi. His work helped spread knowledge of Newton's law of gravitation.