Frans van Schooten

Frans van Schooten the Younger, also called Franciscus van Schooten, who lived from 1615 to 1660, was a Dutch mathematician best known for popularizing the analytic geometry of Rene Descartes. His father, Frans van Schooten the Elder, was a mathematics professor at Leiden whose students included Christiaan Huygens. The younger Van Schooten met Descartes in 1632, read the Geometrie before it was published, and travelled to France to study Viete and Fermat before returning to Leiden in 1643; two years later he inherited his father's position at Leiden's Engineering School. His 1649 Latin translation of the Geometrie, expanded in 1659 and 1661 with commentaries by Hudde, de Witt, Heuraet and de Beaune, was the edition through which Leibniz and Newton knew the work. He proposed extending the method to three dimensions in 1657 and made Leiden a centre of mathematics, and a theorem in elementary geometry bears his name.