Grégoire de Saint-Vincent

Grégoire de Saint-Vincent (1584 to 1667), in Latin Gregorius a Sancto Vincentio, was a Flemish Jesuit and mathematician, remembered for his work on the quadrature of the hyperbola. He gave what has been called the clearest early account of the summation of geometric series and resolved Zeno's paradox by showing that the time intervals involved form a geometric progression with a finite sum. Born in Bruges, he read philosophy at Douai, entered the Society of Jesus in 1605 and was recognised by Christopher Clavius in Rome. He taught in Antwerp in association with François d'Aguilon from 1617 to 1620 and at Louvain from 1621 to 1625, served in the house of Emperor Ferdinand II in Prague from 1628, and from 1632 lived with the Society in Ghent as a mathematics teacher. His thinking developed in Antwerp from the trisection of the angle to infinite series, limits and the method of exhaustion, which he later applied to his theory of ducere planum in planum.