Florimond de Beaune

Florimond de Beaune ( born October 7, 1601 Blois; † August 18, 1652 in Blois ) was a French mathematician.

After he had been in recent years in the military, he later bought a place at the Royal Court council of his native city.

Beaune was a childhood friend of René Descartes and has the geometry of a series of notes written that have been recorded by Frans van Schooten (1615-1650) in his edition of the Cartesian geometry.

Better known is de Beaune by the so-called Beaunesche task that is mentioned in Descartes ' letters 1639: Determination of a crooked line from a property of its tangent. Specifically asked for the curve for which the subtangent have a constant value C ( see figure). Despite efforts by Descartes and Fermat was this problem (whose solution is the exponential function ) unsolved for nearly 50 years. Leibniz was in 1684 in the Acta Eruditorum means of the logarithm of a solution. With the help of integral calculus, Johann Bernoulli in 1693 could indicate another approach.

Florimond de Beaune died in 1652 in his hometown.