François Nicole (23 December 1683 – 18 January 1758) was a French

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

, born in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and died there, who published his ''Traité du calcul des différences finies'' in 1717; it contains rules both for forming differences and for effecting the summation of series. In 1706, he wrote a work on

roulette Roulette (named after the French language, French word meaning "little wheel") is a casino game which was likely developed from the Italy, Italian game Biribi. In the game, a player may choose to place a bet on a single number, various grouping ...

s, particularly spherical epicycloids. In 1729 and 1731, he published memoirs on Newton's essay on

curve In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that ...

s of the third degree..

References

1683 births 1758 deaths 18th-century French mathematicians Members of the French Academy of Sciences {{France-mathematician-stub