ABSTRACT
The son of a prominent family in the Netherlands, in the early 1640s de Witt belonged to the circle of young mathematicians whom Frans van Schooten (ca. 1615-1660) introduced to Cartesian geometry. From his years as a Schooten student came his Elementa curvarum linearum (published in the 1659-1561 edition of René Descartes’s, 1596-1650, Geometry), one of the first textbooks in analytic geometry. It shows that straight lines are represented by first-degree equations involving two unknowns. As for quadratic equations, among other things, de Witt identifies ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas by studying their equations and reduces the equations to canonical form.
