Frans van Schooten
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Franciscus Schooten (1615 - May 29, 1660) was a Dutch mathematician who is most known for popularizing the analytic geometry of René Descartes.
Schooten read Descartes's Géométrie (an appendix to his Discours de la méthode) while it was still unpublished. Finding it hard to understand, he went to France to study the works of other important mathematicians of his time, such as François Viète and Pierre de Fermat.
Schooten's father was a professor of mathematics at Leiden, having Christiaan Huygens, Johann van Waveren Hudde, and René de Sluze as students. When Frans Schooten returned to his home in Leiden in 1646, he inherited his father's position and one of his most important pupils, Huygens.
Schooten's 1659 Latin translation of and commentary on Descarte's Géométrie was valuable in that it made the work understandable to the broader mathematical community, and thus was responsible for the spread of analytic geometry to the world. He was one of the first to suggest, in exercises published in 1657, that these ideas be extended to three-dimensional space. Schooten's efforts also made Leiden the centre of the mathematical community for a short period in the middle of the 17th century.
References
- Some Contemporaries of Descartes, Fermat, Pascal and Huygens: Van Schooten (http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/17thCentury/RouseBall/RB_Math17C.html#Van%20Schooten), based on W.W. Rouse Ball's A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (4th edition, 1908).de:Frans van Schooten