Frans van Schooten

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Frans van Schooten

1615-1660

Dutch mathematician who translated and published René Descartes' Géométrie into Latin and trained a large number of students to give an algebraic treatment of geometry in the Cartesian style, including Jan de Witt and Christiaan Huygens. Van Schooten disseminated the work of these students as appendices to his own publications, most famously Christiaan Huygens' De ratiociniis in aleae ludo (On Calculation in Games of Chance), which was important in the development of probability theory.

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