FONTENELLE

Description

Bernard de Fontenelle, Éléments de la Géometrie de l΄infini, Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1727

First edition of Fontenelle’s main treatise on mathematics. In 1727, as a “Suite of the memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences”, he published the Elements of the Geometry of the Infinite. Some doubted whether it was really the work of a mathematician, but the author believed it and attached great value to it. He had been working on it for a long time, probably since the period of his preface to the Analysis of the Infinitely Small. The term elements must be understood in the sense of ” first principles”. According to Fontenelle, none of the geometers who had invented or used the calculus of infinity had given a general theory of it; this is what he proposed to do. The work is divided into a preface relating the history of this branch of calculus and in two main parts: “General system of infinity” and “Different applications or remarks”. The author discusses “infinity in series or in progressions of numbers” then examines “infinity in straight and curved lines”, in the words of Abbé Terrasson, who re-read the work in the Journal des sçavans (July-October 1728). (Encyclopaedia).