VISTA (El:Axel s,) in biography, a very celebrated French mathematician, was born in 1540, at Fontenai, a province of France. Among other branches of learning in which he excelled, he was one of the most respectable mathematicians of the sixteenth century, or indeed of any age. His writings abound with marks of great originality, and the finest genius, as well as intense application. His appli cation was such, that, it is said, he has sometimes remained in his study for three days together, without eating or sleep ing. His inventions and improvements, in all parts of the mathematics, were ve ry considerable. He was in a manner the inventor and introducer of specious alge bra, in which letters are used instead of numbers. He made also considerable improvements in geometry and trigono metry. He gave some masterly tracts on trigonometry, both plane and spherical, which may be found in the collection of his works, published at Leyden in 1646, by Schooten, besides another large and separate volume in folio; published in the author's life time, at Paris, in 1579, con taining extensive trigonometrical tables, with the construction and use of the To this complete treatise on trigonome try, plane and spherical, are subjoined several miscellaneous problems and ob servations, such as, the quadrature of the circle, the duplication of the cube, &c. Computations are here given of the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the circum ference, and of the length of the sign of one minute, both to a great many places of figures ; by which he found that the sine of one minute is between 2908881959 and 2908882056 also the diameter of a circle, being 1000, &c. that the perimeter of the inscribed
and circumscribed polygon of 393216 sides, will be as follows, via. the Perimeter of the 31415926535 cd polygon . . .
Perimeter of the circum- 2 31415926537 scribed polygon . .
and that therefore the circumference of the circle lies between those two num bers.
Vieta was also a profound decypherer, an accomplishment that proved very use ful to his country. As the different parts of the Spanish monarchy lay very distant from one another, when they had occa sion to communicate any secret designs, they wrote them in ciphers and unknown characters, during the disorders of the league : the cipher was composed ofmore than 500 different characters, which , yielded their hidden contents to the pe netrating genius of Vieta alone. HiS skill so disconcerted the Spanish councils for two years, that they published it at Rome, and other parts of Europe, that the French King had only discovered their ciphers by means of magic. He died at Paris, in the year 1603, in the sixty-third year of his age.