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John Wallis was appointed Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University in 1649. He was then a relative newcomer to mathematics, and largely self-taught, but in his first few years at Oxford he produced his two most significant works: De sectionibus conicis and Arithmetica infinitorum. In both books, Wallis drew on ideas originally developed in France, Italy, and the Netherlands: analytic geometry and the method of indivisibles. He handled them in his own way, and the resulting method of quadrature, based on the summation of indivisible or infinitesimal quantities, was a crucial step towards the development of a fully fledged integral calculus some ten years later. To the modern reader, the Arithmetica Infinitorum reveals much that is of historical and mathematical interest, not least the mid seventeenth-century tension between classical geometry on the one hand, and arithmetic and algebra on the other. Newton was to take up Wallis's work and transform it into mathematics that has become part of the mainstream, but in Wallis's text we see what we think of as modern mathematics still struggling to emerge. It is this sense of watching new and significant ideas force their way slowly and sometimes painfully into existence that makes the Arithmetica Infinitorum such a relevant text even now for students and historians of mathematics alike.Dr J.A. Stedall is a Junior Research Fellow at Queen's University. She has written a number of papers exploring the history of algebra, particularly the algebra of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her two previous books, A Discourse Concerning Algebra: English Algebra to 1685 (2002) and The Greate Invention of Algebra: Thomas Harriot's Treatise on Equations (2003), were both published by Oxford University Press.

- Following on from the 2000 edition of Jan De Witt's Elementa Curvarum Linearum, Liber Primus, this book provides the accompanying translation of the second volume of Elementa Curvarum Linearum (Foundations of Curved Lines). One of the first books to be published on Analytic Geometry, it was originally written in Latin by the Dutch statesman and mathematician Jan de Witt, soon after Descartes' invention of the subject. - Born in 1625, Jan de Witt served with distinction as Grand Pensionary of Holland for much of his adult life. In mathematics, he is best known for his work in actuarial mathematics as well as extensive contributions to analytic geometry.- Elementa Curvarum Linearum, Liber Secondus moves forward from the construction of the familiar conic sections covered in the Liber Primus, with a discussion of problems connected with their classification; given an equation, it covers how one can recover the standard form, and additionally how one can find the equation's geometric properties. - This volume, begun by Albert Grootendorst (1924-2004) and completed after his death by Jan Aarts, Reinie Erné and Miente Bakker, is supplemented by:- annotation explaining finer points of the translation;- extensive commentary on the mathematicsThese features make the work of Jan de Witt broadly accessible to today's mathematicians.