MATHEMATICAL CURIOSITIES. 109 



find in Paris Pierre de la Ramt^e (better known by bis Latinized 

 name Ramus) occupying at the College Saint- Gervais a chair of 

 Mathematics which he had founded and which was subsequently 

 made illustrious by Roberval. Ramus was born in 1515, at the 

 little village of Cutry, and, a simple domestic at the College de 

 Navarre, he found time to study all alone. He had the audacity 

 at one-and-twenty years of age to sustain in the open Sorbonne, 

 which swore by Aristotle alone, that all that the Stagyrite philoso- 

 pher had said was false. Stranger still, "he seems to have con- 

 vinced his judges, who conferred the degree of Master of Arts 

 upon the bold innovator. Teaching philosophy, he continued to 

 decry Aristotle. The Sorbonne was moved by his course to bring 

 him before a tribunal, which declared him rash, arrogant, and 

 impudent for having i^resumed to condemn the course and art of 

 logic received by all nations." He was prohibited from writing 

 and teaching contrary to Aristotle, " under penalty of corporeal 

 punishment." He translated Euclid ; and his ScJiolce mathemati- 

 ccE; in thirty-one books, was long used as a guide in the teaching 

 of mathematics. 



A mathematician of far superior merit to these was Viete, who 

 expounded for the first time some of the most profound and most 

 abstract theories that the human mind has ever invented. Born 

 in 1540, in Poitou, he was appointed in 1580 mattre des requetes 

 in Paris. His time was thenceforth divided between the duties 

 of his ofiice and the study of mathematics. He had an extraordi- 

 nary power of labor. De Thou, his historian, relates that he 

 sometimes spent three days in his study, taking no more food and 

 rest than were absolutely necessary, and not leaving his chair or 

 desk for them. He was commissioned by Henri IV to decipher 

 some dispatches which the court of Madrid had sent to the Gov- 

 ernor of the Low Countries. He acquitted himself very well of 

 this difficult task so well, indeed, that the Spaniards accused him 

 of sorcery. He also solved in a few moments and in the presence 

 of Henri IV a problem that had been proposed by Adrien Romain 

 to all the mathematicians in the world. It was a problem extem- 

 porized as a diversion an equation in the forty-fifth degree. The 

 great analyst demonstrated that the equation depended upon the 

 division of an arc into forty-five parts. He was the one who 

 first in equations represented all the quantities by letters, with 

 which all operations were performed which it had been usual to 

 perform with numbers. 



Vi^te published trigonometrical tables, in which he enun- 

 ciated for the first time the law according to which the series 

 of multiple or submultiple arcs increase. An enumeration of 

 all his labors would require more space than we can spare. 

 By his learned labors of analysis this man, the creator of mod- 



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