François Nicole

François Nicole (December 23, 1683 – January 18, 1758) was a French mathematician, born in Paris and died there, who published his Traité du calcul des différences finies in 1717; it contains rules both for forming differences and for effecting the summation of given series. Besides this, in 1706 he wrote a work on roulettes, especially spherical epicycloids; and in 1729 and 1731 he published memoirs on Newton's essay on curves of the third degree.^[1][2]

References

1. Smith, David Eugene (1958), History of Mathematics, Volume 1, Courier Dover Publications, pp. 472–473, ISBN 9780486204291.
2. Shank, J. B. (2008), The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, University of Chicago Press, p. 74, ISBN 9780226749471.

An original entry was based on the book A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (4th edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball.