Hendrik van Heuraet

Hendrik van Heuraet (1634 to about 1660) was a Dutch mathematician, remembered as one of the founders of the integral. Born in 1634 to a cloth merchant, he inherited his father's estate at twenty-one and became financially independent. He began studying medicine at Leiden University in 1653, where he met Frans van Schooten, Johannes Hudde and Christiaan Huygens, and then studied mathematics privately under Van Schooten. In 1658 he and Hudde went to Saumur in France, and from there he wrote the letter Epistola de transmutatione curvarum linearum in rectas, printed in 1659 in Van Schooten's Latin edition of Descartes's La Géométrie. In it he showed how to find the length of a curve, proving that the arc length of the semicubical parabola could be found, a result that led to a priority dispute with Huygens. He returned to Leiden as a physician, and little else is known of his later life.