History
The curve was first proposed by Descartes in 1638. Its claim to fame lies in an incident in the development of calculus. Descartes challenged Fermat to find the tangent line to the curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a method for finding tangent lines. Fermat solved the problem easily, something Descartes was unable to do. Since the invention of calculus, the slope of the tangent line can be found easily using implicit differentiation.
Read more about this topic: Folium Of Descartes
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)