Editing History of geometry (section)

===The 17th century===
[[Image:Descartes Discourse on Method.png|thumb|[[Discourse on Method]] by [[René Descartes]]]]
In the early 17th century, there were two important developments in geometry. The first and most important was the creation of [[analytic geometry]], or geometry with [[Coordinate system|coordinates]] and [[equation]]s, by René Descartes (1596–1650) and [[Pierre de Fermat]] (1601–1665). This was a necessary precursor to the development of [[calculus]] and a precise quantitative science of [[physics]]. The second geometric development of this period was the systematic study of [[projective geometry]] by [[Girard Desargues]] (1591–1661). Projective geometry is the study of geometry without measurement, just the study of how points align with each other. There had been some early work in this area by Hellenistic geometers, notably [[Pappus of Alexandria|Pappus]] (c.&nbsp;340). The greatest flowering of the field occurred with [[Jean-Victor Poncelet]] (1788–1867).

In the late 17th century, calculus was developed independently and almost simultaneously by [[Isaac Newton]] (1642–1727) and [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]] (1646–1716). This was the beginning of a new field of mathematics now called [[Mathematical analysis|analysis]]. Though not itself a branch of geometry, it is applicable to geometry, and it solved two families of problems that had long been almost intractable: finding tangent lines to odd curves, and finding areas enclosed by those curves. The methods of calculus reduced these problems mostly to straightforward matters of computation.