![]() ![]() They cast a great net, subsuming existing mathematics into the new framework as they organize and simplify, all the while spreading the word and making it available to a broad audience of practitioners, many having already worked obscurely to clear patches of brambles and more than ready for the big breakthrough.ī. Of course the disseminators are mathematicians too, among the select few who expand the new path as well as trod it ("Cartesian" coordinates appear nowhere in Descartes, for example, but were introduced by his acolytes). van Schooten's "appendices" amplified La Geometrie massively, the 1659-61 edition becoming a textbook for Leibnitz and Newton and the rock that calculus was built on. ![]() Perhaps the premiere example is Frans van Schooten and his associates, who did so much to organize and present Descartes' deep but scattered and somewhat opaque geometric approach in La Geometrie. ![]() Niccolò Tartaglia (1499-1557) comes to mind, a great and prolific encyclopedist whose works were consulted in his own day and for generations to come. 1903-1996)Ī truism in mathematics, and perhaps most subjects, is that its disseminators are as important as its creators. ![]()
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