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History. The curve was first proposed and studied by René Descartes in 1638. Its claim to fame lies in an incident in the development of calculus.Descartes challenged Pierre de Fermat to find the tangent line to the curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a method for finding tangent lines.
Descartes' theorem generalizes to mutually tangent great or small circles in spherical geometry if the curvature of the th circle is defined as = , the cotangent of the oriented intrinsic radius. Then: [44] [19]
He then called the logarithm, with this number as base, the natural logarithm. As noted by Howard Eves, "One of the anomalies in the history of mathematics is the fact that logarithms were discovered before exponents were in use." Carl B. Boyer wrote, "Euler was among the first to treat logarithms as exponents, in the manner now so familiar."
In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, first described by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie, is a technique for getting information on the number of positive real roots of a polynomial. It asserts that the number of positive roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's coefficients (omitting the zero ...
René Descartes (/ d eɪ ˈ k ɑːr t / day-KART or UK: / ˈ d eɪ k ɑːr t / DAY-kart; French: [ʁəne dekaʁt] ⓘ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650): 58 was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science.
Logarithmic spiral (pitch 10°) A section of the Mandelbrot set following a logarithmic spiralA logarithmic spiral, equiangular spiral, or growth spiral is a self-similar spiral curve that often appears in nature.
This enhancement of Descartes' work was primarily carried out by Frans van Schooten, a professor of mathematics at Leiden and his students. Van Schooten published a Latin version of La Géométrie in 1649 and this was followed by three other editions in 1659−1661, 1683 and 1693.
Rules 13–24 deal with what Descartes terms "perfectly understood problems", or problems in which all of the conditions relevant to the solution of the problem are known, and which arise principally in arithmetic and geometry. Rules 25–36 deal with "imperfectly understood problems", or problems in which one or more conditions relevant to the ...