Between Tradition and Innovation: Gregorio a San Vicente and the Flemish Jesuit Mathematics School

In Between Tradition and Innovation, Ad Meskens traces the profound influence of a group of Flemish Jesuits on the course of mathematics in the seventeenth century. Using manuscript evidence, this book argues that one of the Flemish mathematics school’s professors, Gregorio a San Vicente (1584-1667), had developed a logically sound integration method more than a decade before the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri. Although San Vincente’s superiors refused to grant him permission to publish his results, his methods went on to influence numerous other mathematicians through his students, many of whom became famous mathematicians in their own right. By carefully tracing their careers and outlining their biographies, Meskens convincingly shows that they made a number of ground-breaking contributions to fields ranging from mathematics and mechanics to optics and architecture.

Ad Meskens (1962), Ph.D., AP University College Antwerp, is a lecturer on the didactics of mathematics. He has published extensively on the history of mathematics in the Low Countries including Mathematics in a Commercial Metropolis (Springer, 2013). He is an active member of the Flemish Association of Mathematics Teachers.