Jacques-François Le Poivre (11 February 1652 – 6 December 1710) was a mathematician and geometer who was a pioneer of

projective geometry In mathematics, projective geometry is the study of geometric properties that are invariant with respect to projective transformations. This means that, compared to elementary Euclidean geometry, projective geometry has a different setting (''p ...

. He is largely known from a single book in French on conic sections, ''Traité des sections du cylindrie et du cône considérées dans le solide et dans le plan, avec des démonstrations simples & nouvelles'' (1704). Le Poivre was born in

Mons Mons commonly refers to: * Mons, Belgium, a city in Belgium * Mons pubis (mons Venus or mons veneris), in mammalian anatomy, the adipose tissue lying above the pubic bone * Mons (planetary nomenclature), a sizable extraterrestrial mountain * Batt ...

to son of Jacques and Catherine Demeurs. The Le Poivre family had many engineers including Pierre Le Poivre (1546-1626), an architect and military engineer. Jacques-François too studied mathematics and geometry and worked as a clerk and surveyor for the city of Mons. In 1700 he moved to Paris and in 1704 he published a treatise in two parts on cylindrical and

conic sections A conic section, conic or a quadratic curve is a curve obtained from a Conical surface, cone's surface intersecting a plane (mathematics), plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is ...

. This work largely escaped serious study and some reviewers considered it to be plagiarism of

Philippe de la Hire Philippe de La Hire (or Lahire, La Hyre or Phillipe de La Hire) (18 March 1640 – 21 April 1718)

. In any case, de la Hire's work was more well-known. In part 2, his method of central projection was essentially the same as used by de La Hire in his 1673 work ''Nouvelle méthode en géométrie, pour les sections des superficies coniques et cylindriques'' but it has been suggested that Le Poivre independently discovered this since the book included several original theorems. A second edition of the ''Traité'' was published in 1708. An earlier work on an introduction to arithmetic that Le Poivre published in 1687 has never been located. He was a friend of

Guillaume de l'Hôpital Guillaume François Antoine, Marquis de l'Hôpital (; sometimes spelled L'Hospital; 7 June 1661 – 2 February 1704) was a French mathematician. His name is firmly associated with l'Hôpital's rule for calculating limits involving indetermin ...

and a simple proof of the intersecting chords theorem by Le Poivre impressed l'Hôpital and may have made its way into l'Hôpital's ''Traité analytique des sections coniques''. A biography claimed that Le Poivre was a poet.

References

External links

''Traité des sections du cylindrie et du cône considérées dans le solide et dans le plan, avec des démonstrations simples & nouvelles'' (1704)
- at the German national library {{authority control Scientists from Paris People from Mons, Belgium 1710 deaths 17th-century mathematicians from the Holy Roman Empire 1652 births Emigrants from the Holy Roman Empire to France Geometers Surveyors 17th-century French mathematicians