Person: Tacquet, Andrea
Andrea Tacquet was a Flemish Jesuit who wrote some popular teaching works.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Andrea Tacquet was born pretty much in the middle of the Eighty Years' War which was a war of Netherlands independence from Spain.
- After this Tacquet, showing his versatility, spent a while teaching Greek and poetry at Bruges.
- From 1640 Tacquet studied theology at Louvain while at the same time he taught mathematics there.
- Throughout his life Tacquet was totally dedicated to his church and to the Jesuit Order.
- Tacquet rejected all notions that solids are composed of planes, planes of lines, and so on, except as heuristic devices for finding solutions.
- It arises from the way that Tacquet thought of curves generated by moving points, but not actually comprising of points.
- Tacquet wrote many good elementary texts designed as mathematics textbooks for Jesuit colleges.
- This book was essentially constructed from Euclid's Elements with material from Archimedes, but that said it was a significant piece of work because of the clarity Tacquet demonstrated in presenting the material.
- Tacquet devised refined procedures to figure out the 'equality of reasons' by approximation.
- Now it was the accidental purchase of Tacquet's own Euclid at an Auction, that occasioned my first Application to the Mathematicks, wherein Tacquet was a very clear writer.
- Tacquet also wrote the textbook Astronomia.
- Tacquet's work was sent to Huygens and a correspondence between the two resulted.
- It is less known that about the middle of the 17th century this remarkable mode of arguing became the subject of an interesting debate, in which the Belgian mathematician Andreas Tacquet and Christiaan Huygens were the main representatives of opposite views concerning its probative force.
- Also preserved is correspondence between Tacquet and Frans van Schooten.
- The importance of Tacquet's work is not so much in the actual results he proved, for he was not greatly inventive in this respect, but rather for the clarity of his writings and the fact that in many ways his approach was important in preparing the way for Newton and Leibniz's integral and differential calculus.
Born 23 June 1612, Antwerp, Dutch Republic (now Belgium). Died 22 December 1660, Antwerp, Dutch Republic (now Belgium).
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Astronomy, Origin Belgium
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
