1661-1704

French mathematician who was instrumental in introducing calculus into France. His Analyse des infiniment petitis (1696) was the first textbook on differential calculus and dominated eighteenth-century thinking on the subject. Jean Bernoulli taught him calculus and agreed to turn his mathematical discoveries over to l'Hospital for a salary. Consequently, Bernoulli's result on indeterminate forms is known as L'Hospital's rule. The pedagogical qualities of l'Hospital's Traité analytique des sections contiques (1707) made it the standard eighteenth-century analytic geometry text.