Editing Frans van Schooten (section)

==Work==
[[File:Schooten - Exercitationum mathematicarum libri, 1656-1657 - 4691956.tif|thumb|''Exercitationum mathematicarum libri'', 1656-1657]]
Van Schooten's 1649 Latin translation of and commentary on Descartes' ''Géométrie'' was valuable in that it made the work comprehensible to the broader mathematical community, and thus was responsible for the spread of analytic geometry to the world.

Over the next decade he enlisted the aid of other mathematicians of the time, [[Florimond de Beaune|de Beaune]], [[Johannes Hudde|Hudde]], [[Hendrik van Heuraet|Heuraet]], [[Johan de Witt|de Witt]] and expanded the commentaries to two volumes, published in 1659 and 1661. This edition and its extensive commentaries was far more influential than the 1649 edition. It was this edition that [[Gottfried Leibniz]] and [[Isaac Newton]] knew.

Van Schooten was one of the first to suggest, in exercises published in 1657, that these ideas be extended to three-dimensional space. Van Schooten's efforts also made Leiden the centre of the mathematical community for a short period in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In elementary geometry [[Van Schooten's theorem]] is named after him.